The Orphans

by Annemarie Neary

  And right away, Jess knows the real conversation has begun, that it has veered down a dark alley where she can’t control it. And yet, she’s unable to tell this woman to stop. Already she is in the middle of a fantasy where Eddie is her real pa and the reason they ended up in Goa in the first place. The thought shames her, and she misses the beginning of Evelyn’s next sentence.

  ‘Not that I blame her for straying, not per se. Just not with my bloke. Your dad – the drink and drugs and all the rest of it. That was hard. When it came to him and Mags, that must have been the last straw for her.’

  Evelyn Tuite’s voice has turned cold. She has something to say and Jess doesn’t know if she has the strength to hear it. And then, in an instant, she loses patience. ‘So what are you saying? That this was all my pa’s fault or—’

  Evelyn seems genuinely taken aback by that. ‘Oh no, my love. No, no, no. That’s not the way it was at all.’

  Jess steels herself. ‘OK. Why don’t you tell me how it was.’

  ‘Soph didn’t need drugs. She got high as a kite on all the attention. Ed was in love with her, sure he was. Why else would he have decided to get involved with you kids? He didn’t have to do that. When it came to the affair, Soph got bored with poor old Ed very, very quickly. The whole thing probably only lasted a month. Look, I know you’re still in touch, so maybe I’m boiling my cabbage—’

  ‘Yes,’ Jess is feeling defensive now. ‘But he’s never mentioned—’

  ‘Why would he? He was the loser, wasn’t he? In the meantime, your mum had moved on to a guy called Dejan. I don’t remember his surname, but he was from somewhere in the Balkans. Slovenia, Serbia, not sure which. A dealer. Eddie did some work for him for a while.’

  She doesn’t know why that shocks her. This was Goa, after all. But she feels crushed by disappointment.

  ‘Eddie was a dealer?’

  ‘I never saw the money, if he was.’ And she takes another deep drag of her cigarette. ‘He did a bit of running for Dejan, but that’s about it. I doubt he’d tell you that, though. Don’t expect he shouts about it these days. Morals were different back then. And when you’re far from home, the rules don’t always make much sense.’

  Jess remembers Dejan, the glittering bracelet on her mother’s wrist. She doesn’t care to acknowledge that.

  ‘Dejan didn’t hang out at the Yellow House with the others. He was a big shot. At least, that’s how we saw him. Funny bloke, with a moustache, mad keen on techno music. I think he ended up going back home, actually. Things were kicking off back there, the old country was breaking up, war starting, all that. And he seemed to think there were opportunities for him in that.’

  Jess is losing patience now. ‘What has this to do with my mother?’

  ‘Like I said, you can’t judge any of it by your own standards. If you don’t want to engage with this, that’s fine. But if you do, Dejan, he’s your key. If you want to know what I think, I think she probably only really wanted your pa, except for the fact that he was out of his head most of the time. Dejan had the drugs your father needed. So, fill in the gaps.’

  She doesn’t care to fill in the gaps, at least not on demand. ‘I mean, thanks for telling me all this. But forgive me if I find it all a bit—’

  ‘Sordid? I guess it was. It looks good from the outside, that lifestyle. But it was hell, specially for the women, specially if you were like me, not exactly Kate Moss. You’ll find it’s usually the men who do better when it comes to free love. But if you want the photos—’

  ‘I can’t imagine Eddie taking photos. I’ve known him most of my life, and I’ve never seen him with a camera.’

  ‘What are you saying then, love? You don’t believe me? You never saw him with a camera so he never had one? People change.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You’d have to come and pick them up though.’

  ‘How come you’ve got the photos if Eddie took them?’

  ‘I took them. He wanted them back, but I held on to them. Because it would hurt, I suppose. All those photos of lovely Soph he’d never see again. You can have them, if you want. In fact, I should have given them to you children years ago.’

  She needs to play for time. ‘Maybe I should talk to Eddie first.’

  ‘Up to you. As for the passport, if Mags ended up with it, my guess is Mags stole it. If she couldn’t have Soph’s man, she was damn well going to help herself to whatever else Soph had. As for the passport, for all we know she might have used it herself.’

  ‘Whoever used it went to Paris.’

  ‘All I remember is that some family had hired her, back in Europe, as a kind of in-house governess. God help them. No idea where, though. Just somewhere on the Continent.’ There is another long exhalation. ‘Come to think of it, she would have loved that. Taking Soph’s way out.’

  ‘Do you think my mother always intended to disappear?’ Jess is almost afraid to hear the answer.

  ‘Doubt it. Not without you kids. No way. She’d never have done that. Her and the little lad, they were joined at the hip. But with you? Yeah, maybe. Can’t blame her for having an exit route.’

  Jess feels a wave of relief, heartbreak, gratitude; she can’t put any one tag on it.

  ‘I’d call that sensible, really, if you’re married to a smack addict. Wouldn’t you? Look, I don’t know what happened, I really don’t. But it was a tiny village, with nothing much in the way of public transport. The only bus came once a week. There’d have been taxis, of course. Tuk-tuks. But apart from that you’d be pretty much stuck there until someone was willing to come and get you out. She must have had transport. If you ask me, Dejan drove her out in that big jeep of his.’

  Jess is about to put an end to the call, but she can tell that Evelyn doesn’t want to let her go.

  ‘And just one other thing. The newspaper said you kids were playing at the water’s edge while your mother read. Well, Sophie never read. She might have picked out a few chords on the guitar, or plaited her hair. But she never read.’

  Jess can hear steps on the stairs outside the bedroom. Charlie wants to beat the traffic, so they’ll have time to accustom Ruby to the hotel babysitter. She hasn’t figured out what this woman’s agenda is. For all she knows, she could be a reporter, a fantasist, a fraud. No reason to think the Daily Post is finished with her yet. The thought of that makes her decisive. And so she tells Evelyn Tuite, quite suddenly, that she has to go, that someone is looking for her.

  ‘Before you go. That photo? The one the papers keep on printing? Ed took that. She got him to take photos of her, of you and the boy.’

  It’s a banal end to a lifelong conundrum, but it will have to do.

  ‘He sent it to the papers. I think he thought if she saw you kids it would make her come back. I think he thought she would come back to him, you see. Even then.’

  ‘Eddie was on the beach that day? I didn’t realise.’ She is feeling sick, and now she just wants to get away. She wants to try to work this out in her head.

  ‘Oh no, dear. I never suggested that. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t taken on the day she disappeared anyway. It was taken, I dunno, a couple of weeks before? Before she dumped him and took up with Dejan. He took it one day they spent together on the beach with you kids.’

  But she remembers no such day, and she is sure she would remember. What if Eddie had been there, in the trees, perhaps, photographing them from a distance while their parents were being attacked, or abducted? What if he did it after the event? Without even realising it, she has cut the call. If Evelyn rings back, she will pretend the call failed. But she doesn’t ring back, and this is all that Jess is left with. A little more, but not much, and not better.

  ‘Jess? You OK?’ Charlie is in the bedroom now. She can hear him sliding open drawers and pulling his weekend bag down from the top of the wardrobe.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. I’ll be out in a sec.’ She flushes the loo and runs the water, soaping Evelyn Tuite away, for now at least.

&n
bsp; By the time she leaves the bathroom, Charlie is downstairs. She has already packed, but then she remembers the walk, the moon in the field, and goes in search of a warm jacket. Her Barbour seems to have disappeared and so she goes to borrow one of Charlie’s instead. It’s while she is retrieving it from his wardrobe that she finds the package. At first, she’s confused as to how her gift from Charlie can have repackaged itself when she left the naked bottle on the bathroom shelf. Not that she will ever use the scent – too cloying, too much violet in the blend. Yet here it is again. Fragrance by Heart. Even as she opens it, she knows. And it is as bad as it could be. Devised for Hana Schweitzer de Abreu, my everything.

  Charlie has already clipped Ruby into her car seat in the back of the big black 4X4 that Jess never has any inclination to drive. As he gets behind the wheel, there is a determination about him, a set to his chin. If they were celebrities, and the two pressmen from earlier in the week were a swarm of paparazzi, this scene would be captioned, ‘Fighting to save their marriage’.

  She will not fight for him. Meanwhile, Ruby is giving her newest toy – a black and white goblin – a contented chew. By the time they reach the M4, she has fallen asleep, her head drooping forward like a tender-stalked flower.

  Charlie puts his foot down. Once they’re past Heathrow, the traffic thins and the light thickens. She refuses to think about Hana. Instead, she flicks back through her emails and finds the message from Evelyn. She reads and rereads it, but when they reach the hotel, she still hasn’t decided what to do. Charlie carries Ruby into the hotel in her car seat as if she is a gift.

  The hotel at Renton has been updated since they were last there. There is still the cantilever staircase spiralling out of one corner, the baronial fireplace in another, but these days the elks are lit in pink neon, and sombre paintings with a Rothko heft to them are paired with Corinne Days. The reception area smells as fragrant as something dreamed up by Fragrance by Heart. And yes, it is all as lovely as she remembers it. But everywhere, she imagines Hana. In the lobby, in the lift, even in the big plush bedroom they have been allocated overlooking the lawns. She can’t think why she agreed to come here.

  At lunch, she is so exhausted she doesn’t really notice the food, but it is tastefully arranged and drizzled on. There is starched white linen and off-pink orchids, beeswax candles and petits fours. How could she not be happy when so much trouble has been taken? She places her hand on the table next to the gleaming array of cutlery, and examines it closely. The nails are painted dark grey, but she can’t think when they were painted or why she chose the colour. Her tiny engagement solitaire has been trumped by a brash marquise-cut stone, a present from Charlie when Ruby was born. This is not her hand. It is not her life. Charlie covers that stranger’s hand with his own, and his touch feels nauseating, warm and moist. She pulls away, then reaches for her napkin to cover the moment. Her face burns, and she lets the stiff, cool linen soothe it.

  ‘I have a package to pick up,’ she says. ‘For Martha.’

  ‘Do you want me—’

  ‘No, no. It’s fine. I need a breather anyway. It all feels, I don’t know, a bit overwhelming I guess.’

  ‘It’s a nice place.’

  ‘Sure. I know. It’s just—’

  He frowns slightly, but he doesn’t press for more.

  Once she’s made the decision to pay a visit to Evelyn Tuite, the rest is easy. It takes a matter of minutes to arrange a golf lesson for Charlie followed by a massage, to book Ruby in with the resident babysitter. Driving out of Renton, over the cattle grid and through the stone columns, she begins to breathe again.

  It takes less than half an hour to get to Evelyn’s house, in a cul-de-sac off a suburban road off Junction 5. It’s hard to find a parking spot because most of the kerb has been swallowed up by driveways onto paved-over front gardens, so she reverses out again and leaves the jeep in the car park of the Harvester instead. The path up to Evelyn’s house is edged on either side in white-painted concrete shells; the house itself is a grey semi, braced with blinds. It suddenly strikes Jess that perhaps she should have rung ahead, but it’s too late now.

  On the phone, it had been hard to imagine a woman in her mid-sixties, but of course that’s what Evelyn is. Her hair has an inch of growth, more white than grey, and she is wearing a kind of batik shift over a pair of black leggings. She looks tired, heavy, disappointed.

  ‘Evelyn, I’m sorry to rock up like this. It’s Jess. We spoke on the phone?’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d come,’ she says, standing back to let Jess in. It’s hard to gauge what she’s thinking.

  As soon as she enters the house, Jess feels like she has upset some unseen apple cart. She is led into a room that is evidently not used very often. A pair of sofas covered in Indian cotton throws face one another across a glass coffee table on which there are two shoeboxes, one Clarks, the other Nike. Within seconds of sitting down, Jess realises she has chosen the wrong seat, even though she was careful to select what seemed to her to be the place of least status, a low Victorian nursing chair. And then it strikes her that the very fact that she selected that chair was probably enough to raise it in the pecking order, that any chair she chose would have been the wrong one.

  Something about the house, hugged as it is into the damp corner of a cul-de-sac, and the fact that Jess is not entirely sure whether she is welcome, flattens the atmosphere and makes it hang heavily around them. Evelyn must be one of the last people on earth to smoke indoors. She makes a performance of it, flinging her butts onto the dead coals in the tiled fireplace. Jess can hardly resist touching the shoeboxes, but Evelyn hasn’t offered them again. She seems different face-to-face. Quieter. Surly and tight-lipped.

  Jess has the thought that perhaps she reminds Evelyn of one or other of her parents, maybe that accounts for the change. Her whole life has been an attempt not to be like Sophie. But maybe that’s the problem.

  ‘You must be hungry,’ Evelyn says. ‘Can I make you something to eat?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she says, her mind flicking back to lunch at the hotel. ‘I’m fine.’

  But Evelyn persists. ‘Surely I could make you a sandwich at least. Come on now, what would you like?’

  She is not hungry, and besides she does not want to eat anything in this house. But she is keen not to be rude either. Cheese, maybe? There is no cheese. Ham? No ham either, and definitely no tuna. She is embarrassed then to have taken the bait at all. Evelyn disappears into the kitchen and re-emerges a couple of minutes later with a red toast rack filled with triangles of toast, some spread with Marmite, others with honey.

  Evelyn slides a press cutting out from behind a painted vase on the mantelpiece. Jess wonders if it is kept there, or if it’s been placed there on the offchance that she’ll visit.

  ‘ “Tragic Sophie and those Orphans on the Beach”. All that palaver. Don’t tell me she wouldn’t have loved all that. Typical Soph. In some ways, she got exactly what she wanted.’

  Her malevolence is astonishing, but Jess is on her turf and for a moment she is shocked into silence.

  ‘She was an attention-seeker, Jessica-May. I hate to say it, but it’s true. I’m sorry you were dragged halfway round the world for the sake of that woman’s vanity.’

  Inside her own head, Jess is protesting that it’s too harsh to say that kind of thing about her mother and expect her just to take it. But Jess is desperate to find out what’s inside the shoeboxes, and so she just nods and forces down the over-milky tea until she has the opportunity to get away.

  18

  It was easy to get into the house while Charlie was packing up the car. Ruby, strapped into her car seat like a convict, was the only one to notice him. She raised her hand and gave him a little royal wave. Ro Ro Ro your boat. Inside the house, Ro stepped behind the cellar door and waited for Jess to come downstairs. Once he heard her setting the alarm, and the front door was slammed shut, he counted to a hundred before stepping back out again. He steeled himself against t
he scream of the alarm, then calmly keyed in Charlie’s birth date to switch it off.

  In the kitchen, he stocks up on provisions: canned fruit and rice pudding and baked beans, more jars of olives and sun-dried tomatoes and two packets of salty crackers. The thought of a mission successfully under way has given him an appetite, and he helps himself to cheese and ham, a large bowl of lentil salad, a banana. To kill time before the meeting on the Old Kent Road, he flops onto the sofa and watches a documentary about Roswell until he realises he knows it all anyway. When the doorbell rings, his first thought is of a large black bird in a police hat.

  He scoots into Jess’s empty drawing room and peeks through the shutters. But this is not the disaster he was expecting, this is joy. Because his mother has come for him. She is standing looking back out at the street, and then she turns and tries the bell again. As she raises her hand, he spots her ghostly tattoo. If it were anyone else, he would melt back into the dark hallway. There is a calculation to be made here, gift horse or not. She rings again, then checks her watch and glances back at the street. But he is terrified of losing her, and so he rushes for the door and cracks it open just a sliver, for fear of prying eyes.

  She looks surprised to see him, startled even. ‘Oh, hello,’ she manages. ‘William. I didn’t know you were still here. I thought … but never mind. Is Jess there? Or have I missed them?’

  It’s Jess she’s come to see. Of course it is.

  He thinks quickly. No, no, not at all. Jess has just popped out, Charlie too, and won’t she come in? And he can’t help thinking spider and fly, though he pushes the thought away.

  ‘I didn’t see the car outside so I wondered …’ She hesitates a moment on the doorstep and he realises then that she won’t cross the threshold unless he invites her to. He is not good at reacting to things he hasn’t initiated.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you, if I just wait a few minutes? I’d love to see them to say goodbye. It’s been so sudden, but that’s Eddie for you. We’re going away, you see. Big trip.’