by Neale, Kitty
‘Give it a rest, Dave,’ she protested. ‘You know me better than that. It’s not for me, it’s for a friend. She’s got all tied up in red tape and I said I’d try to find her a short-cut through. You know how it is.’
‘I do indeed,’ sighed Dave. ‘Well, I suppose I owe you a favour. Where’s the book?’ He hunted through his desk drawer and pulled out a small blue address book she’d never seen before, and flicked through it until he found the page he wanted. ‘Here you go. Try either of these but don’t say I told you. And I want that book back soon as you’ve called them, that’s my insurance.’
‘Thanks, Dave,’ she beamed. Maureen took the book and ran out before he could change his mind.
John put down the phone, not knowing whether to be upset or relieved. Penny wasn’t in. He had known there was a chance she’d already have left for work but had wanted to try her anyway, after the conversation he’d had with his parents over breakfast. No matter how they tried to reason it away, they’d come to the conclusion they were most likely all talking about the same Adrianna. If that was the case then they had to face the fact that Penny had in all probability been conceived at the time Adrianna was having the affair with Kevin. It didn’t prove anything but the possibility was there: they could be half-brother and -sister.
Derek had voiced the other thing that had been worrying him: Penny might have to be told what sort of person Kevin was. Even if she got the watered-down version, it was difficult to make him sound anything other than deeply unpleasant. John didn’t want to add to her sorrow, especially as she had such difficult memories of her mother. If these people really had been her parents, how had she turned out as lovely as she had? The three of them had agreed they would face that if they had to, but in the meantime he owed it to her to explain why he’d left in such a hurry and to ask if she knew anything about her father. He’d chance it and drop by her flat again, although he didn’t feel happy about spending time alone with her now. But she had to know. Then he could take it from there.
All of this did little to heal the ache inside. Whatever happened John knew he could never look at Penny the same way again, suspecting what they did, even if it could never be proved. He felt they’d been cheated of their chance of love, of happiness. He didn’t know what could possibly make up for that.
Maureen almost ran up the stairs to the flat. Now that she knew what she had to do she didn’t want to waste a minute. She’d caught up with Michelle when the girl had managed to complete the late-morning dance class, despite looking white as a sheet for most of it. They’d gone to Bar Italia, although Michelle had only had a mineral water, explaining that coffee now made her gag. She was struggling with the journey into town and back as her sense of smell had become extremely sensitive and all those bodies crushed together on the tube made her sicker than ever. Drinking coffee would be the final straw.
Maureen had wanted to check that she’d got the right end of the stick and that what Mark had reported was right. Michelle had laughed and said yes, that if her fairy godmother flew through the door of the coffee bar then that would be what she’d ask for: a sensible, solvent, loving family for her child.
‘And you don’t trust the authorities to find one?’ Maureen said.
‘You hear all these horror stories,’ Michelle shuddered. ‘I wouldn’t want to interfere but I’d be happier if I knew for sure the family was the right one. I don’t know how the hell that would work but that’s what I’d want. Mark said he’d try to find a way.’
‘Well, Mark has worked all sorts of miracles,’ said Maureen noncommittally. ‘Let’s see how he does with this one.’
Now she burst through the door of her flat, only to find Penny standing in the middle of the living room, her face stricken.
‘Oh my good God, what has happened?’ demanded Maureen, all other thoughts driven from her head. ‘Why aren’t you at work? What’s going on?’
Penny was shaking as she went across to the sofa and slowly lowered herself on it. ‘It can’t be true,’ she said. ‘This is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘For God’s sake, what is it?’
‘It’s … I can’t believe it. I only popped back to change my shirt as I got tea all over the other one. The phone went when I got here and it was John. He got me to meet him outside, wouldn’t come up here. He told me the most unbelievable thing.’ She was trembling as she spoke.
‘Go on,’ said Maureen, with no idea of what this could be about.
‘You know I told him about my mother. Well, he thinks he knew her. He said I looked like her. I do, don’t I?’
‘Yes,’ Maureen replied. ‘You do. The hair, the shape of your face. There’s a definite resemblance. That’s no bad thing, she was a real looker, as you know.’
‘There’s more,’ said Penny. ‘It turns out Mum used to go out with John’s father – his real father, not his stepfather who’s Jimmy’s friend. He went to see his family last night and they worked it out. I might be their child. He might be my brother.’
‘Hang on,’ said Maureen. ‘That can’t be right. Your dad died in Spain, and he was much older than your mum. Don’t you have any pictures of him anywhere?’
‘Mum did,’ said Penny, ‘but I didn’t bring them with me. What’s the point? I never knew him. And I didn’t want a picture of her, you’d have to pay me good money to have her face staring down at me. I left one at Lorna’s.’
‘Then that’s simple,’ said Maureen decisively. ‘We’ll go down to Margate, find the picture, see how much you look like him and ask Lorna what she knows at the same time. How’s that? That mean old sod Dave owes you time off and I could do with a day or two away from his moaning. You should have heard him this morning. So let’s give her a ring. I miss Margate, and it’ll be lovely now, while the sun’s out but the crowds haven’t arrived yet. We’ll soon put this stupid idea to rest. How does that sound?’
‘Okay, yes, that’d be good,’ said Penny, and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that it wouldn’t be that easy.
‘Guess what,’ said Lorna as Robert put down his briefcase in the hall. He’d been working late again – she’d tried to tell him to stop but business was booming once more and he was making up for all the time they’d lost waiting for the insurance after the big storm. She could see how tired he was by the skin around his eyes but he tried to hide it.
‘What?’ he demanded, giving her a hug. ‘Must be something important for you to meet me on the doorstep. Good or bad?’
‘Good, I think,’ said Lorna. ‘Well, yes, definitely good. Penny and Maureen are coming down tomorrow for a couple of days. But Maureen sounded a bit odd, so there might be more to it than a last-minute break.’
‘You have to admit it, Maureen often sounds odd,’ Robert pointed out. ‘That’s just how she is. Nothing unusual there.’
‘That’s not what I meant,’ insisted Lorna, following him through to the kitchen. ‘We’ll eat in about twenty minutes, is that all right? No, she sounded odd for her.’
‘Well, we’ll find out tomorrow,’ remarked Robert, who plainly wasn’t in the mood to speculate what her cousin might be leading up to. ‘It’ll be nice to see Penny. She hasn’t been down since Christmas and I keep missing her when she phones.’
‘Shouldn’t work late so often then,’ said Lorna before she could stop herself. ‘Well, don’t look like that, you know it’s true. Yes, that was one of the strange things. Maureen asked if I could dig out that old photo of Penny’s father. I don’t know if you’ve ever even seen it. He’s about seventy and wearing a navy jacket.’
Robert shook his head. ‘Doesn’t ring any bells. But no harm in you having a look for it. That girl’s had no luck, has she? First a father who dies before she’s born and then a stepfather who doesn’t want to know. I haven’t bumped into Adam for ages but to be honest I’m happy to keep it that way. She’s better off without him.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Lorna. Even thinking about that man made her
furious all over again on Penny’s behalf. How could he treat that lovely girl so badly? He didn’t deserve a stepdaughter. He’d been given a gift and he’d thrown it away. ‘If I saw him again I’d want to slap him. Still, she does have one good father figure in her life. You’ve been wonderful with her for all these years, you’ve just never got the credit from him.’ She shut her eyes. That made her angry too. Robert had had no reason to take Penny in, and, given the way Adam and Ruth had treated him, in fact had every reason not to. But he’d never objected and had welcomed her, even with her stroppy teenage attitude and taste for loud music and weird clothes.
Robert smiled and almost blushed – a rare outward display of emotion. ‘I’d like to think so,’ he said. ‘Because when it comes down to it, we are her family, aren’t we? I know it’s not official. But in every way that counts, we are.’
Chapter Forty-One
Penny found herself looking forward to the trip back to Margate. It felt like ages since she’d been back. Although she regularly talked to Lorna on the phone and sometimes to Robert, it wasn’t the same. After everything that had happened she found she missed them more than she wanted to admit. She was also looking forward to Lorna’s home cooking. It was the most comforting food in the world.
The sun was out and the seagulls were crying as they arrived. ‘Should have brought our swimming costumes,’ she grinned at Maureen as they made their way along the platform. ‘We could have gone to the lido.’
‘No thank you very much,’ Maureen shuddered. ‘It’ll still be freezing. And I haven’t had time to perfect my body for the beach yet. I’ll stay under wraps if it’s all the same to you.’
Lorna was waving excitedly at them from the car park. She ran towards them as they approached, and gave them each a big hug. ‘About time too,’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you want to go straight back to the house or along the front for a bit?’
‘Along the front,’ said Penny instantly. Now they were here, she wanted to make the most of it and to put off the moment of truth for as long as possible. ‘You don’t realise how much you’ll miss the sea until you’re away from it.’
So they drove back the long way round, going past the few early holidaymakers clutching their hats in the breeze, stopping for ice cream, pointing out their old haunts. It was over an hour later before they pulled into the neat drive, and Penny could see that the garden was as immaculate as ever.
It was strange to step back into her old room. When she’d been down for Christmas she’d been taken up with all the rituals of the season and hadn’t really had time to think then. Now Penny was struck again by all that had happened since she had lived here. She could have stayed here and been safe from it all. But then I’d have been stuck with Mrs Manning, she thought. That was like a living death. Despite it all I did the right thing in leaving. I just hope Lorna and Robert agree.
It wasn’t until that evening that they got down to business.
‘Did you manage to find that old photo I asked you about?’ Maureen began.
Lorna went to a box on the sideboard and took one out. ‘Is this it? It had got stuck between a couple of books we moved from your room, Penny.’
Penny took the photo which showed a good-looking man in a smart navy jacket, who was maybe in his early seventies. ‘That’s my father,’ she said. ‘It’s Laurence Hamilton-Smyth. I think that’s the only picture of him that’s left.’ She looked up at Lorna. ‘Unless you have any?’
‘No, I’m afraid not,’ said Lorna. ‘He had already died by the time I moved to Spain and met your mother. She used to have other pictures of him around your house, I remember that, but I don’t know what happened to them. He always looked the same – well turned out, quite formal. If he looked like that at his age, he must have been quite something when he was young.’
‘Can I have that?’ Maureen asked, taking the photo from Penny and holding it up. She looked at it critically. ‘Hard to say, really.’
‘What’s hard to say?’ demanded Lorna. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Trying to see if there’s a resemblance,’ her cousin explained, turning the picture at an angle. ‘We wanted to see if Penny looked like her father in any way.’
‘Why?’ Lorna asked.
Maureen and Penny looked at each other. Finally Maureen said, ‘You’d better tell them what this is about. Are you okay to do that?’
Penny nodded and then, with a sensation of diving in at the deep end, she started the story.
Lorna grew increasingly uneasy as the tale unfolded, shifting in her seat and looking at the floor.
‘So,’ Maureen said when Penny came to a stop. ‘Can you tell us anything? I know you weren’t there when Ruth moved to Spain or when her husband died, but was there anything you remember that might help? I don’t see how we can tell from one old photograph.’
‘Penny, you poor thing,’ Lorna gasped. ‘I’d no idea you were having such a terrible time. You hide it so well over the phone. I wish I’d been there to give you a big hug.’
Penny smiled, grateful for the way Lorna always loved her and wasn’t afraid to show it, but impatient now to see if there was anything new to learn. ‘It’s hard enough to talk about it face to face,’ she said. ‘There was no way I could do it when I rang. So that’s why we wanted to come here, or one of the reasons anyway.’ She tried to look positive but was afraid her lip was trembling again.
‘I see,’ said Lorna. She took a deep breath. ‘I’m not sure how much help I can be. As you know, I only met your mother when you were a toddler, and Laurence was long dead by then. As far as I knew, she was a respectable widow, whose much-older husband had left her comfortably off. From the pictures of him around the place I assumed she’d loved him and there was no more to it.’
‘But?’ said Maureen, sensing that wasn’t the whole story.
‘Well, for a start you came out on your visit,’ said Lorna. ‘When you said you recognised her and where from, that rather destroyed the respectable bit. She didn’t like that at all. She hid it well but I think she was furious. She was also short of money by then so, as you know, we both sold up and came back.’
‘Yes, we know that,’ said Maureen, growing irritated, ‘but what else? Come on, I know when you’re not saying something.’
Lorna twisted her hands together and wouldn’t meet their eyes. ‘It might be nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly definitive proof either way. But yes, she did say something. We used to drink at lunchtimes over there quite a bit – well, you know that too, we did that when you came over.’ She grinned briefly at her cousin then looked away again. ‘One day we’d been to the bar together and had some wine with our salads. It was when my marriage was breaking up and I was pretty upset, so I said to her that I was sorry, as it must bring back what it was like to lose Laurence and even worse not to have him round when Penny was little.’ She sighed. ‘It was hard, as I was falling apart really, so what she said was a shock and that’s why I never forgot it. She said, not really. He’d been a means to an end. He’d been nice enough and she’d been lucky to meet him when she did but she wasn’t particularly sorry he was dead. She even laughed about it. She said he’d looked the part but hadn’t been up to much otherwise, which she was glad of, as she’d had quite enough of all that. As for fathering a child, that had been nothing to do with him.’
Penny gave a gasp. ‘So we’re wasting our time trying to see if I look like the photo.’
Lorna shrugged. ‘Well, she might have been saying it to make me angry, or rub in the fact she’d had lots of men and I’d lost the only one I’d ever loved – sorry, Penny, but it was exactly the sort of thing she’d do. Or she might have been carried away with the drink and made up any old thing.’
Maureen looked sceptical. ‘Always possible, I suppose, but that’s not how I remember her. She could always handle her drink. Vince would have killed her if she couldn’t, she knew too much and could have dropped him in it if she was loose-lipped. Even when she’d had a few, she never
got carried away.’
‘Oh no.’ Another thought struck Penny. ‘You don’t think that thug could be my father, do you?’
‘Hang on, you counted the months,’ said Maureen. ‘Nobody who had anything to do with Battersea in those days would have forgotten the night Chase’s house caught fire. I remember the uproar at the club at the time – we all thought we’d be out of a job. No, unless you were an unusually late baby, I can’t see it. And, to be frank, you look absolutely nothing like him. Which you should be heartily glad about.’
‘Would that be worse than finding that my real father is also John’s real dad?’ demanded Penny. ‘I don’t know what to believe. She didn’t tell you who it was by any chance? But in any case I’m not who I thought any more. I thought my dad was this nice rich old chap who died seventeen years ago. Now I find he’s probably someone my mother had a fling with before fleeing the country. I don’t know if I look like him, if I have any of his habits or if my character is like his. And I’ve got no way of knowing. So who am I?’
‘You’re who you’ve always been,’ Lorna assured her, going across and hugging her. ‘You are your own person, you’ve always known your own mind, and just because you have someone’s genes it doesn’t mean you have to be like them. I mean, you look like your mother but you’re nothing like her in many ways.’
‘Thank God,’ muttered Maureen.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Lorna hastily. ‘Well, she was very determined and you have some of that. And also she was very bright, which you are. But you know how to love, Penny, and that’s a wonderful thing. She never had that, I think it was because she’d had an awful childhood and nobody showed her any affection. I used to feel sorry for her.’
‘Sorry!’ exclaimed Penny. ‘I never felt sorry for her. She knew how to love herself all right. And her bank balance. And that selfish bastard Adam. Just not me. It’s too much. I want to be by myself.’
She ran out of the room, her eyes brimming over with tears.
