Risking It All Page 5

  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 explai
ned 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.’

  ‘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 th
ey 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.’