Fresh Flesh Page 13

  Saz, looking straight ahead at the gathering ducks and pigeons, waited a beat until Patrick seemed almost comfortable beside her and simply asked, “And you fucked her for how long?”

  Patrick exhaled an exhausted groan, “About six months. Five and a half months too long.”

  “Christ.”

  “I was young.”

  “And stupid.”

  “That too.”

  “She’s horrible.”

  “No. Not really. Just a bit …”

  “Cold? Calculating? Manipulative?”

  “She’s bit fucked up actually, Saz.”

  “Yeah, right. I just love it when men excuse women for being bitches by saying they’re crazy.”

  “It works for her.”

  “I don’t doubt it does. And why didn’t you bother telling me about the two of you?”

  “It didn’t seem appropriate.”

  “Bollocks.”

  “I didn’t think it would matter.”

  “You didn’t think it would matter that we needed to get her at a disadvantage, we needed to get information from her, and it wasn’t until we got there that you realized she knew you so bloody well she could wrap you round her little finger?”

  “You didn’t exactly get the better of her yourself.”

  “Thanks a lot, but at least I fucking well tried. I don’t get it, Patrick, she’s hardly your type.”

  “She’s not.”

  “But she’s got a great body?”

  “Great mind too.”

  “Obviously.”

  There was silence again for another minute, then Saz added, “She’s fucking scary.”

  “Because she’s posh, or because she’s too good looking?”

  “Because she’s lying.”

  Patrick nodded his vehement agreement, “Oh yeah. She’s certainly doing that.”

  They sat in the warmth of the late afternoon for another ten minutes until, her fury subsided, Saz realized she could no longer put off the next bombshell. While four big Canada geese beat the ducks to the Japanese tourists’ chunks of broken bread, Saz quietly told Patrick that Lillian Hope, the woman listed on his birth certificate as being his mother was, very likely, alive and well and living in St Ives.

  TWENTY-SIX

  When Saz first told Patrick the news about Lillian Hope he had wanted to get on to the M4 immediately. His initial shock and eagerness gave way to anger that Saz had chosen not to tell him sooner, though his fury faded when she reiterated her very good reasons. After all, Georgina was now winging her first-class way to Geneva and wouldn’t be back until late on Monday. Obviously Saz hadn’t known that earlier, but Patrick eventually agreed it was useful they’d encountered Georgina’s duplicity sooner rather than later. She had a harder time persuading him that this precise moment wasn’t ideal to make an impetuous break for the west. It was five o’clock on the Thursday evening before a summer bank holiday weekend. While the guaranteed ten hours stuck in rapidly overheating traffic would at least have given them plenty of time to work out the best way to approach Lillian Hope, Saz reasoned with Patrick that it might be a little more sensible for them to spend an evening with their respective spouses, rid themselves of some of the day’s frustrations and get in a good night’s sleep so they were ready for the physical and emotional demands of travelling all the way to Cornwall to meet Patrick’s possible mother. She suggested they attack the new dilemma with clearer heads the following morning. Patrick finally accepted it as the great plan that it was. A great plan and therefore doomed to failure from the beginning.

  For a start, Saz had to deal with Chris who was feeling left out and more than a little pissed off that she seemed to have found Patrick’s mother but not his own. He was aware his reaction wasn’t rational, that Saz was having a harder time getting information about him than she was about Patrick – not least because now his mother had returned home he couldn’t offer Saz complete access to the family archives.

  “Chris, you have to understand, this is a lead for you, of sorts.”

  “How?”

  “Well, this woman was actually cared for by Lees. She may even have met Leyton. It might be that she knew other women who gave their babies to them.” Saz didn’t think now was the right time to mention the baby-buying. “There’s a good chance she’ll be able to give us something about your mother too.”

  “I think you’ll find that’s a very slim chance actually, Saz. I asked my mother if she’d ever seen a specialist before they adopted me – you know, like Patrick Freeman’s mother saw Lees?”

  “And?”

  “Yes, she did. But the doctor was called Keane. Not Lees, not even in Cornwall.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah, right. Look, I’m sorry. I’m just feeling a bit bloody jealous actually, I wish it was you and me driving down to Cornwall to meet my mother.”

  Saz looked at Molly sat across the room from her, small baby bump barely discernable beneath her T-shirt, “I know you do Chris, I do too. I’m disappointed they didn’t have the same doctor, but we still know they had the same solicitor. Maybe this woman in Cornwall knows something about Leyton. It’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”

  “Only just.”

  Molly wasn’t able to offer much consolation, but she did add Keane to her medics research list and then cooked Saz and Chris an exceptionally sticky mushroom risotto. Small consolation, but not entirely negligible.

  Patrick’s evening was considerably more fraught. His eldest stepdaughter, Martha, was a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl trying desperately to pass herself off as anything but fourteen. Twenty-one sounded good. And like her mother had been, she was also worryingly successful at it. Which meant they became immediately worried when she didn’t come home. Not at nine when she was expected. Not at ten when her best friend arrived home to the fury of her own parents. Not at eleven when the police were called and expressed their distinct lack of concern; the duty officer had teenage daughters of his own and was surprisingly sanguine about the whole matter. And she was still not home at midnight when Katy called back to tell the same duty officer exactly what a load of pointless tax-payers’-money-wasting cunts the lazy fucking lot of the bloody police force were. Luckily he was equally sanguine about her bad temper.

  By the time Martha did stumble home at two in the morning – distinctly worse for the gin, whisky and cheap lager combinations she’d spent the evening trying out at an undisclosed friend’s house – Katy took a good four hours to blame Patrick for most of her ills. She’d complained about his workaholic nature, berated the weeks he’d given over to sorting out his father’s estate, poured scorn on the concept of yet another television series in the autumn – something else to take him still further away from his family – and finally reserved her strongest vitriol for this ludicrous parent hunt.

  “For fuck’s sake, Patrick, don’t you think that if she is your mother she’d have tried to find you by now? If she’d ever wanted to? What makes you think she’s going to welcome you with open arms? Why the fuck can’t you just leave the poor bitch alone?”

  It wasn’t very fair and it probably wasn’t true and Katy didn’t even mean it in the moment she said it, but once she was in a rage, there was little that could be done to halt the flow of furious bile. Martha had been packed off to bed after her third vomit and so Patrick received the full brunt of Katy’s vented fury. And because Patrick had no reason to feel as guilty as Saz did, and because Katy had spent her evening in a state of heightened anxiety quietly turning into nastiness, and because their relationship had always based itself as much on their excessive passions – both pleasurable and viciously cruel – as on the joys of family life, their fight did not simply end with a slammed bedroom door and sleepy dawn apologies.

  When Patrick picked up Saz at eight the next morning he had not even had the two hours of semi-peaceful sleep she’d managed to fall into just after dawn. Katy woke with an evil hangover and a grumpy, uncomprehending daughter to deal w
ith, and the bitter awareness she’d let her mouth run away with her. Not for the first time – which she covered with a face of continued bitchiness because Patrick was leaving the house before they’d had a chance to deal with Martha together. Molly woke ill again and pissed off that Saz was going away, leaving her to her lonely nausea. Breakfasts were skimpy and caffeine-fuelled, goodbye kisses were rushed and perfunctory.

  Fortunately neither of the women left at home knew their partners were on the sunny motorway heading into a blue sky west, roof down, music far too loud, and an unspoken bond of quietly wicked delight at being able to run away. The traffic queuing to join the M4 had never looked so good.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  For most of the past twenty-five years Lillian Hope had lived alone. She did not enjoy the closeness of other people, physical or otherwise. She attempted relationships but they’d never made her happy. Other people had not made her happy. She had tried intimacy – in her experience it was not worth the pain. Lillian was big and constant and good. But she did not enjoy the closeness of other people.

  She was known to be reliable and trustworthy, but she was not known well. She ran a Bed and Breakfast, clean and comfortable, no frills. Her B&B was not in any of the major guides, it would not rate four stars. Or even three. It was candlewick bedspreads and blankets, not duvets, thin cotton sheets. The sheets were expressly not nylon. Lillian’s place may not have been terribly modern, but neither was it a tacky cliché. She enjoyed caring for her guests. Liked to be busy. Lillian fed extra special breakfasts to the nice guests. Fed good breakfasts even to the not-so-nice ones. It was rare that Lillian dealt with not-nice guests. They were not welcomed back the following summer.

  Many things might rank a guest in the unwritten list of not-nice. Prime among these was asking about family. Lillian would happily talk about their families until they’d run out of relatives; she did not want to discuss her own. Lillian was her own family. For very many years she had been both mother and child to herself.

  At first, after almost four years of the redbrick, Lillian lived in a house with seven others. Equally broken, bent people, battered people. It was a halfway house to nowhere; people did not leave to move on, they left only to return to the redbrick institutions from whence they came. Theirs was a house that would be home that was halfway into society – though no one ever quite made it all the way back. They would yo-yo from halfway to redbrick to scared foray into all the way. And then come running back. There were no success stories. Until Lillian. For ten years Lillian was beneath the state, not of it. Three years in the place of redbrick, and many years more semi-comatose in the halfway house. And then one day it was time for her to be out of there. Freedom or rejection, she could not work out which, it came to her as a surprise, a shock. They were not able to keep her in the halfway house any longer, the halfway house was closing, the community would care for her. It didn’t, there were no resources, and people who had spent years protected from the hopscotch monsters slipped through yawning cracks in pavements and fell into dark night streets in London and Glasgow and Manchester. But Lillian was saved.

  Lillian’s guardian angel was an old lady who couldn’t walk up four flights of stairs any more. A yellowing card in a newsagent’s window and Janet took the place of the mythical care in the community. Lillian moved into Janet’s Bed and Breakfast, odd-job girl too old for the title, but still not grown enough in life to be a woman. Janet didn’t bother with women or girls, instead she taught Lillian to be a landlady. Janet did not ask questions, was quite honestly not interested. Janet had enough unanswered questions of her own, she did not need to add to the list. What Janet did do was teach Lillian to cook full English for sixteen in half an hour, scrambling four eggs for ten people, using stale crusts to soak up the bacon fat and buttering the fresh loaf before slicing it.

  Lillian learnt all her sadly lacking life skills from Janet. Lillian learnt getting by and making do and reserve. Lillian had never had enough reserve and even her three years in the redbrick was not long enough to teach her the value of keeping her mouth shut. Seven years of halfway house taught her only form-filling and DHSS ruses and carefully locking your door at night. But Janet taught Lillian how to look after her own heart. It was a lesson she could have done with ten years earlier, but still not too late to learn.

  After four years Janet died and left the house to her protégée. There was a court case and Janet’s flesh daughter – the one who hadn’t laid eyes on her mother for six years – tried to reclaim Lillian’s home. She was unsuccessful. Like Lillian, Janet understood the system too. She had kept back so much that Lillian never knew. There was more told in that court case than Lillian had ever heard from the old woman’s mouth herself. More than she needed to know. In the end, though, the legalities were in order and the house was hers. The daughter took half the furniture and all the old pictures, but Lillian didn’t mind. There was some refurbishment to do anyway. A spring clean was well overdue.

  The following winter Lillian redecorated in time for the early season and welcomed her first guests on Maundy Thursday just as Janet had always done, plenty of hot water to wash their tired feet, weary from the long walk uphill from the bus station, and then a cold supper waiting for them on the dining table. Scotch eggs and corned beef sandwiches, ready-buttered cheese scones, bulk-bought Arctic rolls individually foil-wrapped. She knew how to please her guests.

  Lillian took in the same families year in, year out. She remembered their foibles, likes and dislikes. Lillian valued the regularity, the safety of welcoming the same people to her door year after year. Knew who would put up with the late summer rain, knew the would-be painters and their desire for that perfect stroke of light. Lillian watched their children grow. She was happy to share an afternoon cup of tea with the mothers and grandmothers, back from the front for a rich tea and a little gossip about the new daughter-in-law, the old second cousin. The holiday-makers were free with their news and freer with their mouths, and their joy in the unburdening meant they rarely noticed that Lillian did not gossip, Lillian did not give her stories in return. And even those who did notice were used to it. They imagined that perhaps Lillian had no news. Pictured themselves as her news. They comforted themselves with the thought of their own largesse and were easy in the expansive wealth of her wide comfort. It seemed to be a fair transaction. They would not disrupt Lillian, they were happy with the status quo. So was Lillian. Or, if not happy, then happy enough. It would do. All you need is all you need.

  And there were casual guests too. Even in the height of the season Lillian had always tried to keep one room back. Not a very good room, but twin beds and clean sheets and a basin with running water. Just in case someone came begging. A tired couple all the way from London, an Asian family perhaps, obviously turned away at three or four other places, still quite a rare sight down here, slowly dawning on them why they’d been told Cornwall was like England in the ’50s. Not just the safe and clean beaches then. Someone who would only want the room for a night, who would eat a fast breakfast and be gone by nine. Lillian was always glad to help out, to provide unexpected succour. She knew what it felt like to need a room and have nowhere to go.

  She was glad she could do something for Saz and Patrick when they stood on her doorstep. They could obviously do with a break. The girl looked like she hadn’t slept in a week; his shoulders were tense, his face drawn. Of course they could have the room. It wasn’t anything special, but it was probably the best they were going to get, this time of year. And by the way, didn’t she recognize him? From the telly?

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  On the journey down to Carbis Bay, Patrick had decided he was going to have to stay in Lillian’s B&B if at all humanly possible. Saz thought this was a very dodgy idea to say the least, but Patrick had no intention of allowing her to dissuade him. They negotiated their way around the plethora of roundabouts and past the families spilling from the pavements into the road, all trooping home from the beach for a fish an
d chip tea, small children weighed down with sandy buckets and spades and salty water wings, exhausted parents weighed down with salty, sandy, sun-burned children.

  Saz tried one last time. “Patrick, the woman who runs this place might not be your mother. We don’t know anything for definite. And even if Lillian Hope is your mother, there’s no guarantee she’s here right now. She might have gone away for summer herself.”

  “It’s the height of the fucking season, Saz. If she’s not here right now then she’s a worse fucking landlady than she is a mother.”

  “Yeah, OK, maybe – but I still don’t think we should just barge in there and confront her, for all you know, she might not want …”

  Saz broke off abruptly as Patrick swerved dangerously close to the oncoming traffic in an attempt to avoid knocking down a little girl on a half-size bike, trailing behind her parents who each held a tiny baby in their arms.

  “For fuck’s sake! What the hell do they think they’re doing? They bloody well shouldn’t be allowed to breed. Fucking morons! Christ, if they can’t keep their attention on one bloody kid, what the fuck are they doing having another two? Jesus fucking Christ!”

  As Patrick honked the horn ferociously and screamed abuse at the startled parents, Saz decided she’d be better off keeping quiet herself. There was nothing she could do to calm Patrick’s seething nerves, and clearly any more discussion would only rile him further. She sat beside him, eyes glued to the map in front of her, quietly indicating left and right turnings, and hoping that the calm she was trying her best to pretend and to communicate to the man beside her would somehow get past his frazzled aura and help them both through the next hour or so.

  Half an hour later they pulled up outside Lillian Hope’s B&B, and Saz sighed with relief at the “No Vacancy” sign in the front window. But Patrick made her go and ask anyway. At the very least, he reasoned, Lillian might open the door and he’d get a chance to look at her. Against her better judgement, Saz walked across the small lawn, bordered with a flourishing jungle of huge geraniums and lush begonias and, breathing hard herself, lifted a nervous hand to ring the doorbell. Moments later her heart plummeted at the sound of shuffling footsteps coming down the stairs and the door was opened. Of course, the woman answering the door might have been the cleaner, a housekeeper, Lillian’s assistant, Lillian’s best friend or even, appearances to the contrary, Lillian’s own mother. But if the tall, rounded, greying woman who stood in front of Saz wasn’t Patrick’s mother, then she looked out of Patrick’s eyes by pure chance, and Saz had already used up her week’s quota of lucky coincidences.