Risking It All Page 4

  ‘I’ll do it in the morning,’ I said.

  ‘Better do it now.’

  ‘Hari will hear.’

  ‘Use the one in the shop.’

  Hari appeared from behind his newspaper. ‘What is all this?’

  Gan said loudly, ‘We were saying, if they haven’t found this nurse’s body, she might turn up. People do go missing and then walk in the door years later.’ He glanced at me and whispered, ‘Sorry, Fran.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I told him. ‘People certainly do go missing and they do turn up. I just hope the doctor’s widow’s daughter doesn’t take fourteen years to walk back into her life.’

  Chapter Three

  I did phone that night, from the shop, on my way out. I got through to an answering machine and Clarence’s voice telling me to leave my number and he’d get back. If I did that, when he got back, the odds were Hari would pick up the receiver. I put it down without leaving a message.

  This in itself was enough to prevent me spending a good night. General conditions in the garage made doubly sure. I’d left the Calor Gas heater on low and could hear it hissing gently at me in the darkness, but even so, the temperature struggled to rise above freezing. The wind poked icy fingers through the cracks between wall and roof. They prodded at me maliciously if I showed signs of dropping off. The smell of oil and fuel from the ghost of the motor vehicle once kept here seemed stronger. There were scattering noises in the corners which I kept telling myself could not be mice, because Bonnie would’ve taken care of them. She was snoring happily at my feet. Halfway through the night it began to rain, and the noise on the corrugated roof was horrendous. I couldn’t live here much longer. I’d have to try the housing department again. I’d already put word out on the street that I was looking for a squat to share. Response so far had been zilch. It was discouraging in more than one way. Sharing a squat is a skill. You learn it, and if you don’t use it, you get rusty. I feared I’d become used to being on my own, even in the few months I’d had the flat. Heaven help me, even in my present less-than-perfect circumstances, the thought of sharing again worried me.

  Around three in the morning, just as I had finally fallen asleep, Bonnie growled and I awoke. I sat up with that sense of panic you get if you’ve not been sleeping well and something disturbs you. Bonnie was making a low, resonant, primitive sound. I’d got to know Bonnie’s growls. There was the one when we played tug-of-war with an old rag which was her make-believe-I’m-fierce growl. There was the tentative one when she wasn’t sure about something. Then there was the danger one, like now. I sat up and put out my hand to communicate with her. She was standing by my folding bed and I could feel the hackles raised on her neck.

  Running footsteps sounded in the access road outside the garages. They ran past my unit, then seemed to hesitate before turning and running back again. I could guess what was happening. This little roadway is a dead end, leading only to the garages. Someone was being chased, and had turned into the poorly lit entry only to find he couldn’t get any further and was obliged to run back. He could’ve been running from anything or anyone, a mugger or something quite different. Why he ran didn’t matter. He ran.

  If you live on the streets you see people running and you don’t ask why. You just get out of the way. You never see the pursuers. If they pass you within spitting distance, you don’t see them. Life on the streets requires a kind of blindness and deafness which can be switched on and off. It isn’t only street-dwellers who develop this. People who work at night – refuse collectors, street-washers and gully-emptiers, night-shift workers, tarts – they concentrate on what they’re doing, where they’re going, make sure no one is coming after them, and get the hell out of it if trouble blows up. Perhaps this runner had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong moment and realised it. He ran.

  He may have left it a fraction too late. I thought I heard voices in the distance, shouting. A car screeched nearby, an engine throbbed, was revved up, and the vehicle made off at speed.

  After that I lay there, dozing fitfully, to the sound of London waking up and starting a new day, echoing through the locked main doors. Newspaper delivery vans began to arrive. That meant Ganesh would be up and about. I crawled out of the sack and got dressed, which didn’t take long as I slept in most of my clothes for warmth. I pulled on my jacket, laced up my boots and, with Bonnie at heel, left through the back door and tramped across the yard towards the bright light of the shop.

  ‘You’re early,’ said Ganesh, yawning.

  I mumbled at him and went to make coffee in the washroom. Bonnie was out in the yard, pottering around. Ganesh had the radio on. I gave him a hand assembling the Sunday supplements into the relevant papers. They seem to get fatter and fatter. You wouldn’t think people had time to read them all. But if you forget to put, say, the motoring supplement in the Sunday Telegraph, the buyer is back within thirty minutes angrily demanding to know why he doesn’t have the complete set. So then you have to pinch one from another made-up copy because there’s never a spare. If he’s short, it probably means you’ve put two motoring supplements in someone else’s set. Get my drift? But when you’ve taken one from another set, that set is incomplete and the whole thing is linked into a sequence of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

  So it was a normal day and yet wasn’t normal. It was a day like no other. It was the day I was going to make contact with a woman who’d walked out of my life fourteen years before and whom I’d been confident I’d never see again.

  I breakfasted upstairs with Hari and Gan, and when they’d gone down to the shop, rang Clarence Duke.

  ‘You’re early,’ he said, sounding a bit miffed. It was just after eight. ‘It’s Sunday.’ That meant I’d got him from his bed for sure.

  I told him I’d been up a couple of hours. There’s a particular feeling of virtue which comes from telling someone you’ve been busy while they’ve been dead to the world.

  ‘What’s more,’ I said, ‘I rang last night and you’d left your answering machine on. It wasn’t convenient to leave a message. It wasn’t my phone.’

  ‘I’ve got a private life, you know,’ he said.

  ‘I thought I had one until you turned up,’ I retorted.

  I heard him make a noise which sounded like a yawn. ‘Does this mean you’re going to see Eva?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m thinking about it,’ I told him, unwilling to commit myself aloud, despite the fact that my mind was made up and Ganesh, even as we spoke, was arranging to borrow his mate Dilip’s car.

  He said, ‘Right, glad you’re going.’

  That annoyed me. It wasn’t what I’d said. But it was what I’d meant and he’d realised it. He gave me the address and phone number of the hospice. He sounded offhand, which surprised me a little. But perhaps he had another case to follow up and, now he’d concluded this one satisfactorily, he’d lost interest. Or, more likely, he was going back to bed.

  As I hung up it occurred to me that he referred to my mother, his client, in a very familiar way. Never Mrs Varady or whatever name she used these days. Always Eva. But it was too late to ask him about that. There were a lot of questions I probably should have asked him and hadn’t. There’s nothing like going into a strange and frightening situation absolutely stone-cold ignorant.

  The hospice was at Egham. I hadn’t expected it to be out of London. But possibly there is a scrap of consolation in passing your last days in nice leafy Surrey, rather than among the bricks and traffic of a big city.

  ‘It’s going to take us half the afternoon to get there and find it,’ I said to Ganesh.

  He told me not to worry; even in Dilip’s car we’d do it easily. I decided not to phone ahead first. Simply, I was afraid they’d put my mother on the line and I wasn’t ready for that. I wasn’t ready for any kind of meeting, but I’m never at my best on the phone, anyway.

  We rattled through Egham in Dilip’s beat-up elderly Datsun, rather lowering the tone of the place. They’re very upmarket in Egham.


  I didn’t know what to expect of a hospice; something like a hospital, perhaps. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was a large brick house halfway up a hill outside the town, set in a big garden with lots of trees between it and the road. We clanked and bounced down the drive and parked where a noticeboard said Visitors.

  There didn’t seem to be too many visitors at the moment despite it being Sunday. It was just as well, I thought, as we climbed out. Gan wore a saggy waxed jacket which looked as though it might have been worn for heaving bales of newspapers around since dawn. I had on black leggings, my new zip-sided boots and a bright yellow puffa jacket I’d bought at Oxfam. It was warm but unflattering. I looked like a Winnie-the-Pooh who’d hit hard times. I’d also experimented with dyeing my hair a purplish red, having got fed up with its normal mid-brown. At least my last close-trimmed haircut had started to grow out and I had a bit more hair these days to dye. Ganesh had kindly said it didn’t look bad. ‘Better than it did, anyway,’ he’d added.

  We had left Bonnie behind in the storeroom at the shop. Though Ganesh is definitely anti-dog, Hari rather approves of Bonnie. He thinks she’s a good watchdog. She certainly barks. But she’s only small, a Jack Russell type. I don’t think villains of any sort would find her too much of an obstacle, especially as she tends to identify with anyone wearing smelly old jeans and to distrust the better dressed and well-heeled. She and I both.

  We stood before the main entrance and stared at the glass doors leading into a spacious lobby, the only sign this wasn’t a regular private house.

  ‘There’ll be an office of some sort inside,’ Gan said. ‘We should go there first and tell them who we are.’

  ‘Do you think we’ll need identification? I haven’t got any.’

  Gan had his driving licence, but that didn’t verify my identity. All I had was Duke’s business card and I’d have to use that to back up my story if need be. We rang the bell.

  After a wait, a middle-aged woman in a grey cardigan and matching pleated skirt appeared on the other side of the glass.

  ‘It’s open!’ she mouthed at us. To demonstrate it, she pulled the door towards her.

  We sidled in, apologising.

  ‘No matter!’ she said cheerfully. ‘I’m Sister Helen.’

  Viewed closer at hand, she could’ve been anything between forty and sixty. Her skin was extremely clean-looking, shiny, pink and white like a milkmaid in a nursery-rhyme book. She wore no make-up. ‘Sister’ might mean she was a nurse but I was more inclined to believe she was a nun. They don’t wear long black habits these days but I’m tuned in to nuns, as you might say, being a long-lapsed Catholic.

  There was a strong scent of flowers in the hospice. Large vases of them stood all around. But they couldn’t disguise a lingering odour hard to pinpoint but which came from sick bodies.

  I took a deep breath. ‘I’m Fran – Francesca Varady. I believe you’ve got my mother here.’ I should’ve asked Duke what name she was using. I’d feel a fool if Sister Helen didn’t recognise Varady. Fortunately, she did.

  ‘Eva,’ she returned in the same cheerful manner. ‘I’ll take you along to her, this way.’

  She beckoned with a hand as scrubbed clean as her face, nails neatly trimmed, turning to lead the way as she did so. Ganesh looked nervously round the flower-filled hall and whispered, ‘Shall I stay here?’

  ‘No, I need you with me!’ I grabbed his hand and towed him along in the wake of Sister Helen.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ she said chattily over her shoulder. ‘Did Mr Duke find you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said tersely.

  So she knew all about Clarence. I wondered if she’d suggested my mother hire a private eye. We passed a dayroom on the way with people sitting around in it, some watching TV, one or two reading. One woman was knitting, a long strip of work like a scarf, all different colours. She was surrounded by scraps of wool and her fingers moved methodically, creating something which had a beginning but no end other than hers. She’d go on adding to it until that moment came when she laid down the knitting needles for ever. I guessed it occupied her mind. The atmosphere was peaceful, by no means depressing.

  Our guide opened a door. ‘In here. Eva? Are you awake, dear? Here’s a visitor for you.’

  She stood aside. I could do nothing else but walk in, but once I’d got over the threshold, I froze. My legs wouldn’t take me any further. On the way to the hospice, I’d conjured up all sorts of ways to deal with this moment, but as it was, my mind was a complete blank. Ganesh, behind me, bumped into me. I felt him give me a little push in the middle of my back. His breath tickled my ear as he whispered, ‘Go on!’

  I couldn’t. I stayed rooted to the spot just inside the door, staring across the room to the woman who was propped up in the bed by the window. She turned her head and our eyes met. I opened my mouth, hoping something would come out.

  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 length
s 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.