by Ali McNamara
‘I think so.’
‘I’m not sure I would,’ Jack says, reaching down from his chair to throw Barney’s ball for him again.
‘Cheers!’
‘No, I mean without seeing some proof. Of course I’d trust you. I’d trust you with my life, Kate.’ He reaches up and takes hold of my hand, and I smile down at him. ‘So we just wait then?’ Jack asks.
‘Yep, we just wait for now, and hope Julian does what he says he’s going to.’
The next day I’m standing in the shop gazing out of the window thinking about Clara, Arty, Maggie and now Freddie as well when Molly comes into the shop.
‘I’ve done it,’ she says dismally.
‘Done what?’ I ask, still distracted.
‘Broken up with Chesney.’
‘Oh, Molly, I’m sorry I didn’t realise. How did it go?’
Molly shrugs. ‘Not great.’
‘Break-ups rarely are. How was he?’
‘Angry at first, then sort of … dismissive.’
‘Dismissive?’
‘Yeah, like I was joking or something. I’m not sure he really believed that’s what I truly wanted to do.’ She half laughs. ‘That’s how high an opinion he must have of himself.’
I put my arms around her and pull her close.
‘I’m sure it won’t be the last time you have to break up with a boy. Like I said, it’s never easy.’
‘I don’t think I’ll bother with men in the future,’ Molly says sighing. ‘It’s too much like hard work. I’m gonna stick with Ben – did you know he’s gay?’
‘Yes,’ I say smiling. ‘I did. He’s a lovely boy.’
‘Oh yeah, the best, and much more fun than a proper boyfriend! We can hang out together without all the other hassles.’
My phone rings in my pocket. I pull it free and look at the screen. It’s Julian.
‘Sorry, Molly, I need to take this. Will you be all right?’
‘’Course!’ Molly says. ‘Anita left us some Victoria sponge upstairs, so I think I’ll let that drown my sorrows for a while!’
‘Hi, Julian,’ I say quickly into the receiver as Molly heads upstairs to the flat. ‘Any joy?’
‘I have it,’ Julian says.
‘So soon?’
‘Yep, it wasn’t that simple to get, but you’d be surprised how easily people can be persuaded when money comes into the equation.’
I didn’t like to think of Julian having to bribe someone to get the information we required, but it was the only way we might ever get to the bottom of this mystery.
‘What do you have? A name, a number, an address?’ I ask hopefully.
‘All of the above,’ Julian says proudly. ‘Do you really think it will help?’
‘Yes,’ I reply confidently. ‘I really do.’
At lunchtime I meet Jack, and we head around to Julian’s cottage.
Jack and Julian greet each other slightly awkwardly, but I have no time for their male insecurities today as I need to get on with what we’re actually here for.
‘Here you go,’ Julian says, handing me a piece of paper. ‘All the details of the last owner of number seven Treleven Hill, St Felix.’
Julian had managed to do what we couldn’t – he’d been able to procure the name, number and address of the last owner of the house with the blue door. The house that both the sewing machine and the easel had come from, and the house where we’d found Maggie’s name scrawled in the cupboard under the stairs.
I look down at the paper. Susan Cross, it said, followed by a mobile number and an address near Penzance.
‘Shall I phone it?’ I ask them both.
‘That’s the plan,’ Jack says. ‘Unless you want me to?’
‘No, I’ll do it,’ I say, and I take a deep breath before pressing the digits into my phone.
I half expect this Susan Cross not to answer. I was always wary when an unknown number called me, so I prepare myself to leave a message, but to my surprise someone answers.
‘Hello?’
‘Oh, hello,’ I say, staring wildly at the other two. ‘Is that Susan?’
‘It is, yes. Who is this, please?’ The person I’m speaking to has an odd accent – half British, half American.
‘Oh, you don’t know me, but my name is Kate … Kate Anderson. I wondered if I could ask you some questions about the house you have for sale?’
There is a slight pause before Susan says in a terse voice, ‘All queries about the house should go through the realtor … sorry, the estate agent. How did you get my number?’
‘No, it’s not about purchasing the house,’ I say quickly. ‘It’s about who used to live there. I wonder if you know anyone called Maggie, Clara or even an Arty perhaps?’
There’s silence at the other end of the line, and I wonder if Susan has hung up on me.
‘Who are you again?’ she asks.
‘My name is Kate and I’m looking for anyone who might have known them. I know either they lived at the house or someone in their family did.’
‘I have no clue what you’re talking about,’ Susan says. ‘Like I said, if you have a query about the house then please contact our estate agent. The house will be going up for auction very soon, and you are welcome to bid for it then.’
Damn! I glance up at the wall and see one of the Winston James prints. ‘What about Freddie?’ I say quickly, before she can hang up. ‘Do you know anything about him?’
‘What did you say?’ Susan asks sharply.
‘Freddie,’ I repeat. ‘I think he might have been called Wilfred too?’
There’s another long pause, but this time I don’t think Susan has hung up. Instead, she says eventually, ‘I think we need to talk.’
Thirty-four
‘Stop fidgeting,’ Jack says, as we wait in the café for Susan the next day. ‘You’re making me nervous.’
‘Sorry, I can’t help it. I am nervous. I wonder what this Susan wants to talk to us about?’
‘You’ll find out soon enough, won’t you?’
Susan had agreed to meet us the next day in St Felix. She said she would drive up from Penzance to meet us, but she didn’t say anything else that gave us any hope or expectation at all.
‘It must be something to do with Freddie,’ I continue, tapping my finger on the table. ‘She wasn’t at all interested in anything I had to say until then.’
‘You won’t have to wait much longer,’ Jack says, looking across at the entrance to the café. ‘I think this might be her.’
A middle-aged woman with dark hair tied back in a loose pony tail is staring anxiously around the café’s interior.
‘Susan?’ I say, standing up.
She nods and makes her way over to our table.
‘I’m Kate,’ I say, holding out my hand to her. ‘And this is Jack. Thank you for agreeing to meet with us.’
Susan shakes both our hands, then pulls out a chair and sits down.
‘Would you like a drink?’ I ask. ‘Tea, maybe, or coffee perhaps?’
‘No, thank you,’ she says. ‘I can’t stay too long.’
‘Right, okay then,’ I say, suddenly feeling incredibly nervous again. I don’t know why but I felt a huge weight was upon me – the weight of not only our expectations but of Arty and Maggie’s too – to solve this mystery.
‘So, Susan,’ Jack says, taking over when I don’t speak. ‘The names Kate mentioned to you on the phone yesterday. Do you know any of them?’
Susan nods. ‘I know all of them,’ she admits to my surprise. ‘Well, I say know. I knew some of them.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘Clara and Arty were my grandparents, and Maggie is my mother.’
I stare at Susan while Jack continues. Little Maggie from the paintings is still alive? I don’t know why but I’d assumed all of them would have passed away by now.
‘I see …’ Jack says, sounding like a detective in a police drama about to solve the crime.
‘Why are you asking about them?’ Susan asks. ‘Is this
to do with the house?’
‘Some information has come to us,’ Jack says enigmatically. ‘We can’t say how or from whom, but we think it involves your family and possibly the relationship they had with a painter called Freddie, or rather Wilfred Jones, to give him his correct name.’
Susan looks at Jack suspiciously. ‘I’m going to be honest with the pair of you,’ she says, turning to me as well now, ‘in the hope you will be with me in return. The only reason I’m here today is that my mother is ill … very ill actually. She has dementia.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ I say, finding my voice now. ‘Really sorry. Poor Maggie.’
Susan looks oddly at me. I don’t blame her – after all she doesn’t know how we knew her mother. We’re just two strangers asking a few peculiar questions.
‘Do you know my mother?’ Susan asks, mirroring my thoughts, ‘because it sounds like you do.’
‘I don’t know her exactly …’ I glance at Jack, maybe I should just be quiet.
‘What Kate means is we’ve heard lots about her. We know she overcame polio in the fifties, and that she was in a wheelchair and then learnt to walk again. She must have been a strong woman, your mother. Believe me, I know how difficult it is to lose the use of your legs.’
Susan nods. ‘Yes, she did indeed do those things, but how do you—’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Jack says quickly. ‘What’s important now is Freddie. You obviously know something about him. Kate said you reacted on the telephone when his name was mentioned?’
‘Yes, I did, and that’s what I was coming to. Because my mother has dementia she doesn’t always make a lot of sense, and she gets lost in her memories of the past quite a bit. But sometimes she can be as sharp as a pin, and you’d think there was nothing wrong with her. It’s those times we cherish now.’
We nod sympathetically and wait for Susan to continue.
‘I’m going to have to tell you some background information so that what I’m going to say will hopefully make sense – is that all right?’
‘Perfectly,’ I say, keen to know as much as we can about Maggie.
‘My grandparents lived in St Felix for many years. My grandfather was an artist and my grandmother ran a little shop there. A few years after they got married they bought the house we’re selling now.’ She smiles. ‘They had every intention of naming the house but my grandmother always called it “the house with the blue door”, and it sort of stuck.’
A warm feeling floods through my body.
‘Sadly, my grandmother, who I never knew, died before I was born from pneumonia contracted during a bout of ’flu, I believe.’
My stomach twists at this news. Poor Clara.
‘But my grandfather continued to live at the house with my mother for many years. She wasn’t his real daughter, but he always cared for her like she was. One day when she was of an age to do so, my mother decided she wanted to trace her real father. I’m sure my grandfather wasn’t too happy about it, but my mother was pretty stubborn, and still is, for that matter,’ Susan smiles. ‘Anyway, all she knew was he was a US serviceman by whom my grandmother had become pregnant at the end of the war when he was stationed near to her home, so you can imagine it wasn’t the easiest of searches trying to find him.’
I glance at Jack. At last we knew Clara’s story. Maggie was the product of a war-time dalliance with an American soldier.
‘So she decided to go to the States to try to find him, which is how I came along. My mother, like my grandmother before her, became pregnant by someone she only knew briefly and never saw again. Our family is good at that.’ She smiles again. ‘It nearly happened to me too, but I’m pleased to say I eventually married the father of my child.’
I smile now. Their family tale was all too familiar to me.
‘Did your mother find her real father eventually?’ I ask.
‘Amazingly, she did. He was married by then, with another family, but they welcomed Mom and then me too into their family.’
‘How lovely,’ I say. ‘So you and Maggie stayed on in America?’
‘Yes, for about ten years. We saw quite a lot of my stepfamily – we spent Thanksgivings and Christmases with them. They were very generous to us, but then my English grandfather became ill, and my mother decided to move back here to take care of him. After all, he’d looked after her when she needed it, and now it was her turn to repay the favour.’
I think about Arty all alone in that large house for so long, and how much it must have meant to him to have Maggie back with him again.
‘So, we moved back here again and we lived in that house for many years. My grandfather Arty passed away eventually, so then it was just Mom and me there until it was suddenly my turn to move on. I was desperate to return to the States again. It was where I felt I’d done a lot of my growing up. I always made regular trips back to the UK to see my mother though, and it was on one of those trips I met my husband-to-be – the father of my daughter Maggie.’
‘You called your daughter after your mother? That’s nice. Must have been a little confusing with two Maggies in the family.’
‘Usually it would be, but my mother became more and more eccentric as she got older. She began only answering to the name Peggy for a while.’
‘Another pet name for Margaret!’ I say, suddenly getting it. ‘That’s why no one in St Felix knew a Maggie, because she called herself Peggy when she was here last. My colleague thought she remembered an eccentric old lady called Peggy living in the house with the blue door. She said she liked to keep herself to herself.’
‘She did indeed. She became something of a recluse in that big old house, but we began to notice that she was becoming forgetful and we were worried about her. My daughter moved down here to Cornwall to be closer to her – she’s an artist too so it was no hardship for her to come down to Cornwall to paint and keep an eye on Mom. She’d been living in London previously. We didn’t want my mother to know she was being watched over so we made it seem as natural as we could.’
Something else occurs to me. ‘Did your daughter spend a lot of time in the house when she was younger?’ I ask.
‘Yes, we took holidays down here with my mother.’
‘That explains the graffiti in the cupboard! We thought it was your mother, but she seemed a bit old to be playing in a cupboard under the stairs.’
‘No, that was my Maggie,’ Susan says. ‘She was obsessed with Harry Potter at the time – still is a bit, I guess, even though she’s almost thirty now. So you do know the house then?’
‘Yes,’ I admit. ‘We did visit with the estate agent when it came up for sale.’
‘But why?’
‘It’s an odd thing, but Jack and I met because we’d both bought things that had come from that house. You asked the owner of Noah’s Ark antique shop to do a house clearance for you, didn’t you?’
Susan nods. ‘Yes, it took a number of years but we began to realise that Mom’s forgetfulness was becoming more serious. She was forgetting to feed herself and wash, and often she didn’t seem to know what year it was, let alone what day. She resisted moving out of the house, of course. She was stubborn, as I said earlier, but we had to make her for her own good. Maggie, my daughter, said she would look after her at her house in Penzance as there was more care assistance available there, so Mom didn’t have to go into a retirement home, but how long she can do that I’m not sure. She’s getting pretty bad these days. Have either of you ever had anyone close to you suffer from dementia?’
We shake our heads.
‘I’m glad. I hope you never do. It’s truly awful to witness, but like I said earlier there are some brighter days. I’ve been staying with Maggie while the house is cleared and sold, so she doesn’t have all that to deal with as well as Mom. We didn’t want to sell the house, but if Mom does need specialist care then that will help to pay for it as it’s incredibly expensive. You said you bought some things from the house?’
‘Yes, I b
elieve I have your grandmother’s old sewing machine.’
‘And I have Arty’s old easel,’ Jack says.
‘You do! Oh how wonderful. I’m glad they went to good homes. My mother always said they were special. It’s a real shame we couldn’t keep everything, but that house held a lot of stuff and a lot of memories too,’ she says wistfully. ‘That’s why we brought my mother back here not so long ago. She was desperate to see the place again, so we let her – well, her memories – lead us around St Felix. She took us to some strange places.’
‘Like where?’ I ask, wondering if I already knew the answer to my question.
‘She took us to the end of the harbour up by the lighthouse? And then along the coastal path. My mother’s mind may be failing her but her body certainly isn’t! Then to some holiday flats that I think might once have held Arty’s studio judging by what she was saying, and afterwards, and this is really odd, to one of the old fisherman’s cottages. She just stood outside looking at it, and then started muttering something really strange. She kept saying something about Freddie and Freddie’s paintings. We had no idea what she meant?’
I glance at Jack. He looks as white as I suddenly feel.
‘She got quite upset,’ Susan continues, ‘so we took her for a cup of tea in the outdoor café, up by the Lyle Gallery. She calmed down a bit, so we thought everything was okay, but then she saw a poster for an art exhibition that was on at the gallery and I swear I’ve never seen my mother move so fast. It was like she was a young girl again.’
‘What happened then?’ I ask, knowing almost exactly what had taken place. Julian had mentioned an incident at the gallery, and knowing what I knew now I was sure this was going to be it.
‘We paid to go in and she headed straight for the temporary exhibition they had on. That’s when she went very quiet. She stared at the paintings for a short while and then she began to cry. She broke down completely in the middle of the gallery, sobbing. We tried to console her and explain to some silly woman who came over to see what was happening that she had dementia and didn’t really know what she was doing, but she asked us to leave as we were disturbing the other visitors. There were only a couple of people in there, for goodness sake!’
