by Neale, Kitty
‘Yes, definitely,’ she said, confused now, as he rose to go. She followed him to the door of the flat. ‘Well, you have my number, give me a call.’
‘I will,’ he said, and hugged her. ‘Look, here’s mine.’ He kissed her cheek, but only briefly. How strange, Penny thought. Only minutes ago they’d been kissing properly and now they seemed to be back to being friends. Maybe he didn’t like to be rushed?
‘Hurry back,’ she said. ‘I missed you when you were away.’
‘And I missed you,’ he said. ‘I thought about you a lot. Believe me. Thank you for the food, thank you for everything. I’ll see you soon.’
And he was gone.
Penny stood there in the middle of the kitchen, not sure what to feel. She’d wanted him to stay much longer, she wanted to be kissed again – she wanted more. Unfamiliar feelings surged through her, quite unlike anything she’d experienced with Eduardo. This felt profound. She couldn’t be mistaken. This wasn’t an infatuation. This was the real thing. And he’d felt it too – that they’d known each other for ever, that they were connected. So why had he run off?
That’s what John had done. He’d escaped, but why? Try as she might she couldn’t make sense of it. Picking up the photos, she carried them through to her room and laid them out on the bed, her bedside light shining dimly on them.
Even in those conditions she could tell they were outstanding. Penny didn’t know much about photography, but he seemed to have captured the essence of the creatures – birds, hares, deer. It was as if he was in sympathy with them, somehow he understood them.
How could he take pictures like this but let her down? She couldn’t have got it wrong. John was a good man through and through. She just didn’t understand him. Yet.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
John almost ran down the stairs and only the thought that Penny might be able to see him stopped him from flying down the street outside as fast as he could go. He couldn’t believe what he had just heard. Surely there was a mistake. He tried to think clearly but all he could hear was the name Adrianna over and over in his head.
There had to be other women by that name, he told himself. It was unusual but not completely unheard of. And yet that hair, the shape of her face … was he imagining it or was there a resemblance? And the fact that she was only sixteen – that was surprising enough on its own, he’d thought she was older, but if she really was that young then did that fit with what had happened in the past?
There was a pub coming up on the corner and he went in and ordered a beer to give himself a chance to calm down. This wasn’t how the evening was supposed to go. He couldn’t believe it when he’d arrived. Penny was even more beautiful than he’d remembered her, and she was so interesting to talk to, so lovely in every way. He’d hoped against hope she’d feel the same and when she’d held him and kissed him he had had the overwhelming sensation that somehow he’d come home. Now he feared something unspeakable had very nearly happened.
John cast his mind back to the strange events when he was a schoolboy. He’d always known that the man he called Dad wasn’t his real father. Everyone had been open about that, but it didn’t matter as Derek was the man who’d raised him and looked after him as well as anyone could have done. But when he was about thirteen he’d been told that his real father, Kevin, was going to be released from prison. They hadn’t wanted him to hear the full extent of Kevin Dolby’s crimes but he’d found out anyway and they sickened him. Dolby had pretended to repent and to find religion but it had all been a ruse to con his own parents out of their money.
Even though John’s mother, Pearl, had wanted nothing more to do with her first husband, she’d been happy for her son to continue to see his grandparents. John had loved his grandfather, who’d encouraged his love of birds and nature and praised him for his skill at drawing. His grandmother had been a difficult character, but he knew she’d loved him, in her own way. It was while he’d been staying with her that he’d encountered Adrianna.
Kevin had turned up at the little bungalow with a very glamorous woman in tow, and there had been a right to-do, as there hadn’t been room for everyone to fit in the place. Adrianna hadn’t exactly helped, seeming to think she was above it all, looking down her nose at them. But even then John had been able to tell there was something very special about her. He’d been too young to have had anything to do with girls and had barely begun to think of them in that way, but this woman had made a deep impression on him. It was only when he grew older that he’d put a name to her star quality: sex appeal.
Could this woman have been Penny’s mother?
Sickened to his stomach, John began to count back the years. Was it possible? If Adrianna was her mother, could it be that Kevin Dolby – his own father – was her father too? Was the young woman he’d been kissing so ardently just an hour ago in fact his own half-sister?
Mark was watching the dancers anxiously from the wings when he sensed Maureen coming up behind him. He nodded towards Michelle.
‘Doing all right, isn’t she?’
Maureen watched for a while and then nodded. ‘Not bad at all. You wouldn’t know. But it’s early days yet.’
Mark turned and whispered, ‘Let’s go where we can talk properly.’ He knew the dancers hated anyone having even a muttered conversation anywhere near them. Although the audience couldn’t hear it, they claimed it put them off.
Leading the way to the small kitchen area, where he automatically put on the kettle, Mark wondered how to put what he wanted to say. ‘I was talking to her earlier,’ he began.
Maureen waited, not sure where this was going to go. She opened the biscuit tin to see if anyone had brought in something interesting but there were just the remains of some old Rich Tea. She didn’t fancy those.
‘She looks okay but underneath she’s a mess,’ he said. ‘She told me what she’d really like, in an ideal world.’
‘And what’s that?’ Maureen asked sceptically. ‘Not to be pregnant in the first place?’
‘Well, apart from that,’ he said, pouring two cups of tea. ‘No, as that isn’t possible, and she’s still clear about that, then what she’d want is a family she knew was suitable to raise the baby. She knows she can’t do it herself. So I said I’d help find her one.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘You did, did you? And how are you going to do that, then?’
‘Not the foggiest,’ he said. ‘That’s why I thought I’d ask you. You know everybody.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ Maureen said. ‘Well, now, as it happens I’ve been putting out some feelers. I haven’t got very far yet. But maybe her and me have been thinking along the same lines. If she wants to have it but not keep it, it’s the obvious thing. It’s just a case of how to manage it.’
‘You make it sound easy,’ he said, stirring his tea.
‘No, it won’t be that,’ she said, knowing she was understating it. ‘It’s going to be bloody complicated. And that’s if everyone agrees. I haven’t asked people yet. But it helps to know that’s what she’d like. I didn’t want to suggest it in case I said the wrong thing again.’ She sighed and ran her free hand through her hair. ‘Penny was right, it can’t be no fun being an unwanted child. Funny, I knew she’d had a bad time when she was younger but I’d never heard her put it like that before. Makes you think, don’t it?’
‘Sounded grim,’ Mark agreed. ‘She didn’t have a father around, then?’
‘I think Lorna said he died around the time she was born,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t stand the thought of a lifetime with that bitch Adrianna, or should I say Ruth, I would imagine. Can’t say I blame him.’
‘She was that bad?’ asked Mark.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘She was that bad.’
John got on the tube at Oxford Circus and was lucky to find a seat. The journey back down to his mother’s in Battersea always took ages and he wanted to think. Maybe the beer hadn’t helped after all, and on top of the wine as well, but it had given him space to go
over what had happened. He’d come to the conclusion that he’d have to talk to his mother about it. She wasn’t exactly ill – he’d exaggerated to make his escape – but she wasn’t getting any younger and he knew she’d missed him while he’d been away.
The more he thought about it, the more the dates added up. He could remember very clearly that fateful visit to his grandmother. He knew what year at school he’d been in as he could recall his form teacher; it had been not long after they’d moved from Winchester back to his parents’ home turf of Battersea, and this teacher had been good to him and helped him settle in what was to him a strange city. Counting forward from then, he could see that what he most feared was only too possible. Adrianna would have been with his own father at exactly the time Penny was conceived. But he couldn’t have any way of knowing if she’d been faithful to him or whether he was just one of many boyfriends. Kevin had died not long after, and so there was no way of checking with him – even if his word could have been trusted. Somehow John thought that even if his biological father had lived to a ripe old age, he still wouldn’t have believed a word he’d said.
As he changed from the tube to the mainline train he realised he was in shock. While he’d been round the block a few times he still hadn’t met the one soul mate who was right for him and he’d begun to nurse the hope that it might be Penny. Now if what he suspected was true that was out of the question. Thank God they’d only kissed. That was bad enough. He paused as the mixture of beer, wine and chicken pasta threatened to come back up again.
If it was true he’d have to break it to her somehow and he didn’t think he could bear it. His own disappointment was bad enough; he couldn’t stand the thought of witnessing hers. She was blameless in this whole thing. All she’d done was offer him love and kindness and he was going to have to turn her down flat as the consequences didn’t bear thinking about.
He strode along the road to his mother’s house, the one they’d moved to all those years ago when they’d left Winchester. On the ground floor was the shop she still ran, selling art supplies and crafts. She’d built it up practically from nothing, and he was very proud of her. It cut him to the quick to think he was going to bring the pain of the past back into her life but there was no way round it.
Shutting his eyes, he rang the bell.
Penny was finishing the last of the washing up, a distracted look on her face, when Maureen got back to the flat.
‘Not too early, am I?’ she grinned. ‘Didn’t want to interrupt anything but I’d been at that club quite long enough and if I’d stayed any longer Dave would’ve got me working on something else. He’s up to something with the planners again, have you noticed?’
‘Mmmmmm,’ said Penny, not really listening. ‘Sorry, what? No, no, it’s fine, he left a while ago.’
‘Did you have a good time?’ Maureen asked, thinking that the girl seemed a bit out of sorts. ‘Did he like your cooking? Didn’t have a row, did you?’ She threw her coat on the sofa.
‘Of course not,’ said Penny, her expression wary. ‘Why’d you say that?’
‘Because you don’t look like someone who’s had a wild evening of passion with a wonderful man,’ she said frankly. ‘Or even a wonderful evening with a lovely, interesting man. You seem a bit … I don’t know, a bit down.’
Penny deliberately hung up the tea towel as slowly as she could and then turned to face her.
‘It was wonderful to start with,’ she said. ‘We got on better than I could have imagined and everything seemed to be going really well but then he had to leave early. It all happened very suddenly. I don’t know, maybe he’d forgotten to tell me when he’d have to go, or he felt … he felt I was rushing him. But he’d seemed so happy.’ Penny stopped and Maureen thought for a moment she was going to cry. Then she recovered and went on. ‘Maybe I was imagining it.’
‘Maybe,’ Maureen said doubtfully. ‘Did he say anything about coming back? You are seeing him again, aren’t you? Did you say anything in particular to drive him away?’
Penny shook her head in anguish. ‘I don’t think so. He said he’d come back – he’s left me his new collection of photos and he’ll need them. We were just talking about our backgrounds and I mentioned my mother. I was worried he’d be shocked when I told him what she used to do for a living but that didn’t seem to be it. And he knew all about the club. So it wasn’t as if he was put off by that. So I don’t really know.’
Maureen shook her head and tried to think what to say. She hadn’t come across this situation before, in all her vast experience of men. Still, the one thing she did know was that the better you thought you knew them, the less true that proved to be. Maybe this John was more complicated than he’d seemed.
‘Not to worry then,’ she said as brightly as she could. ‘If he’s left his stuff here he’ll be back. Who knows what the rest of it was about? If it’s important he’ll tell you. It’s good he doesn’t mind about the club because, no getting away from it, some folk do. Still, Jimmy would no doubt have told him anyway. So that won’t matter. It could be anything and nothing to do with you at all.’ She walked across to the little kitchen and hugged the girl, who even in her flat shoes towered above her now. ‘You really like him, don’t you?’
Penny nodded, and her chin banged against Maureen’s shoulder. ‘I’ve never met anyone like him. We feel right together. He thinks so too.’
‘There you are, then,’ said Maureen, rubbing her back, even while she wondered what all this was about.
‘So that’s what I’m worried about,’ John finished, staring at his mother’s kitchen table as he slumped in a chair. ‘Am I going mad? Please tell me I’m going mad.’
Pearl shook her head, finding it all too much to take in. It was late, she’d had a tiring day, and now this story of John’s seemed almost too impossible to be true. But her heart ached for her son. He was so distressed and she had no way of knowing if he was right or not. She reached out and took his hand across the table.
‘You aren’t mad,’ she reassured him. ‘What you say makes some kind of sense. The dates are right. I’ll never forget that time, what with your gran ending up in hospital and then Kevin dying. But that doesn’t mean this girl’s your sister. I never met this Adrianna, neither did Derek, so that doesn’t help. But all we knew from what happened after was that she was a stripper, had worked for Vincent Chase the local heavy, and had disappeared around the time his house caught fire. Which was just after Kevin came out of prison. So it could be right.’
John sighed deeply. ‘I’ll have to ask her if she knows anything. It’s not fair on her to keep her in the dark. It’s not fair on us, full stop. I thought we … I hoped we …’ He couldn’t go on.
Pearl continued to hold his hand, realising how much this young woman must mean to her son. It was strange. She’d often wondered what she would do when he finally met somebody he was serious about; Derek often teased her about still being over-protective of John even though it had been a very long time since he’d needed that protection. But never in a million years had she imagined something like this.
‘You’ll sleep here tonight,’ she told him. ‘No sense in going back to your flat this late. We’ll think about it in the morning. We’ll ask your dad.’
‘He won’t tell anyone, will he?’ asked John, alarmed. ‘It mustn’t get back to Jimmy. I can’t have them all looking at Penny and wondering. That would kill her.’
‘No, of course not, you know you can trust him with your life,’ said Pearl instantly. ‘Now I’m going to make us some cocoa. What we need is a good sleep. Everything might look different in the morning.’
Chapter Forty
Maureen decided to stop by Dave’s office early in the morning to see if she could pick his brains before they were too addled with whisky. It was a close-run thing whether it was better to tackle him hung over or drunk, but she needed names and she needed them to be accurate – she didn’t need him to be good-tempered.
Just as wel
l, she thought as she pushed open the outer door. She could hear him swearing from the other end of the corridor. ‘Bleedin’ jobsworths!’ he was shouting.
Hurrying down the corridor, Maureen knew all she had to do was get the information and get out, not stick around to be yelled at, blamed or drawn into whatever he was up to this morning.
‘Hiya!’ she called breezily as she went into his office. ‘What’s gone on here? Hurricane hit it, has it?’
‘Don’t be so bleedin’ smug,’ growled Dave, wiping his already sweaty forehead. ‘You have no idea what I go through for this place, no idea. I try to expand it, set up new lines of business, keep your pet niece in work, and then the council try to stop me. One step forward, two steps back. Every bleedin’ time.’
‘I thought you were all square with them now?’ Maureen asked innocently, beginning to stack the papers that had fallen off the desk. Dave didn’t look as if he was in any state to bend down to pick them up.
‘Oh we’re all right with the Ashdown stuff now,’ he said grandly. ‘It’s a miracle what the right word in the right ear can do. They won’t get any further forward with their cockeyed plan. I’ve cooked their goose good and proper. No, it’s the other lot now. All I wanted to do was make one small change to the opening hours and they’re on my back soon as you can say knife. You’d think I was a criminal. You’d think I was a Central American cocaine smuggler.’ He leered. ‘But we sorted them out, didn’t we?’
‘And I’m sure you’ll sort these out as well,’ said Maureen, neatly avoiding his attempt to grab hold of her. ‘Leave it out, Dave, it’s early. I got work to do and so have you. No, I just wondered, with all that hobnobbing you did with the council, if you had any contacts in other departments.’
He looked at her suspiciously. ‘Might have, what’s it to you? What other departments?’
‘Social services,’ she said. ‘Children’s social services.’
‘What? You gone soft? You suddenly care about kiddies?’
