The Traveller's Daughter

by Michelle Vernal

  “Yas would you shut up for a minute and let me talk!”

  “Alright, alright hang on, one, two, three clench and release.”

  Kitty rolled her eyes; she didn’t want to know what kind of exercise her friend was doing.

  “One, two, three, clench and release - all done thank God. I won’t be able to walk tomorrow after that last lot. Hang on while I grab a drink.”

  Kitty held the phone away from her ear but could still hear the glug, glugging noise that followed.

  “That’s better. It’s important to keep hydrated with good old H20 you know. Give me one more sec and I’m all yours.”

  When she came back on the phone, Kitty couldn’t hear the pounding beat in the background anymore just the sound of running water.

  “I’m in the changing room. So come on then spill.”

  “I have just gotten the most out there Facebook message.”

  “Delete it, there're all sorts of weirdo’s in cyberspace. I once had a complete random, some chicken farmer from Devon sent me a friend request. I mean it’s not as though Facebook is a dating app and more to the point I don’t even like eggs.”

  Kitty shook her head.

  “No, not weird like that. Just listen, this French photographer called Christian something or other French-sounding says that he took a photograph that became quite famous of my mother with her boyfriend. Who, by the way, was not my dad but some guy called Michael, in a French town back in 1965. He reckons Tres Belle, you know the fashion magazine –”

  There was a loud squeal, and Kitty held the phone away from her ear. “Oh, I love Tres Belle! Watch this space because one day my designs are going to be all through its pages.”

  “I don’t doubt it but for now the magazine has commissioned this Christian fella to recreate the same scene in the photo he took back in 1965. It was called Midsummer Lovers which is kind of a gross title for a photograph with my mum in it. He wants me to pose for it along with the nephew of mum’s old boyfriend this Michael whoever he was to mark the 50th anniversary of the original being taken.”

  “What? Repeat all that and slower this time? Much slower.”

  Kitty repeated what she had just said, and there was a moment's silence as Yasmin processed what her friend had just told her. Lots of questions were forming in her mind, and she needed to put them in order. “Okay, so firstly I’m thinking how did this French guy find you, and what was your mum doing in France in 1965? I thought she was Irish.”

  “She was though she’d spent the best part of her life here so in a way she was more English than Irish. She never lost her accent though, and she was always saying these mad Irish things like it's no use boiling your cabbage twice. I have no idea what she was doing in France or who this Michael was either.” Kitty did a quick mental calculation. “She’d have only been about sixteen in 1965. Christ if I’d swanned off to the Continent with a boyfriend at that age she would have killed me! She never mentioned anything about having spent time in France; my parents were Majorca package holiday devotees.” Kitty frowned, picking at a bit of carpet fluff off the dark denim of her jeans. “I’ve told you how Mum’s life prior to meeting Dad was a closed book. Anything before the age of nineteen was a no-go zone that she refused to talk about no matter how many times I asked her to. She’d just tell me her childhood was uneventful so therefore it was not worth talking about.”

  “Yeah you’ve told me, it’s well weird that.” Her voice was muffled, and Kitty pictured her cradling the phone between her chin and shoulder as she undid her laces.

  “You didn’t know my mum, she wasn’t weird, just as stubborn as they come. If she made her mind up about something, then that was it the end of story.”

  “Still you don’t believe all that crap about her childhood being uneventful do you because otherwise why all the secrecy?” Yasmin straightened and unlocked her locker. She fished her bag out of it with her spare hand. Kitty’s mother had been an enigma, unlike her mum with her hard face and dodgy back that got noticeably worse whenever she dragged her brood into the local benefits office to sign on for the sickness.

  Yes, her childhood had been so very different to her friend’s quiet and civilised upbringing. She’d grown up in a council flat fit to burst with half brothers and sisters in Hatfield. There hadn’t been much in the way of money, but there was plenty in the way of noise. Just like their respective childhoods their reasons for coming to London were so very different too. Hers had been to escape that noise for a while. She wanted to make her way in the world far away from the council estate existence she’d always known. Kitty’s had been to put as much distance as she could between herself and her ex Damien, who lived in a posh Manchester apartment.

  Both women had their dreams, though, and this was the common denominator that brought them together and sealed their friendship. Kitty’s was to open her cupcake café, and Yasmin’s was working towards designing her clothing label. One day, she would tell herself, the High Street stores she loved to browse, fingering the newest fabrics and imagining how she would improve the latest looks would be stocking her brand. The models in this particular daydream would be wearing her signature twist on the rockabilly look as they showed off her designs at London Fashion Week. They would strut their stuff down the catwalk to the tune of her all-time favorite performer, Elvis, after which they would spend their morning tea breaks at Kitty’s gorgeous little café. When she got to that bit though she always had to pause, was it such a good idea for her models to stuff themselves stupid on cupcakes before doing a show? Still she was not an advocate of the size six model and the clothes she planned on whipping up would be far better suited to the real woman, therefore she’d allow the girls one cake each. With that thought comforting her, she slammed the locker door shut before sitting down on the bench and asking, “Have you seen it, this photograph I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t he attach it?”

  “He did I just haven’t opened it yet.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Kitty cringed. “Don’t shout Yas and I haven’t opened it because I am scared. This is the first real clue to my mother’s past I have ever had.”

  “All the more reason you need to open it!”

  “I know, I want to I just can’t seem to make myself do it. I wish you were here with me, and I wish I could bake. Baking always calms me down.”

  “Right Kitty Sorenson listen to me! Now is not the time to be thinking about cakes.” Yasmin adopted the tone she used with her little brothers and sisters when they were awkward little toads. “You, my girl, are going to hang up this call, and then you are going to count to three, and when you get to number three you are going to open that attachment. Got it?”

  “But –”

  “No buts, I said got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “And then when you have done that you are going to forward the picture to me for a sticky beak. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Right then hit the red button.”

  Kitty disconnected the call and counted to three.

  Chapter 3

  A Turkey never voted for an early Christmas – Irish Proverb

  Kitty chewed her bottom lip as she stared at the black and white photograph filling the small screen. Her eyes alighted instantly on the young girl pictured, and she barely registered the man next to her. It was like looking at a picture of herself as a teenager and at a stranger both at the same time she realised. The difference being that her go-to outfit at sixteen had been a black t-shirt, denim mini and leggings, her hair had been straightened with almost religious regularity to resemble Jennifer Anniston’s do of the day. This girl in the photo, her mother, albeit a much younger and softer version than any she’d ever known was dressed in the demure, feminine style of the 1960’s.

  Her look was that of Audrey Hepburn in her Sabrina hey-day. Rosa was wearing a white, boat necked dress with puffed sleeves, cinched waist and a full skirt; her shoes were flat
sandals. Her blonde hair was pulled up into a high ponytail, and she was sporting a blunt fringe that was sitting just above startlingly thick and dark eyebrows at odds with her fair hair. They were Kitty’s eyebrows, except her mother’s were obviously unfamiliar with tweezers back then and as for that fringe, she cringed. It suited the times, but the length was one that would have seen her suing Tamsin at ‘Your Style’ who cut her hair whenever it got to the driving her bonkers length.

  She continued to soak in the photograph absorbing not the background scene with its hazy stone archway and buildings but rather the look on her mother’s face. She was gazing up at the man next to her with a broad smile on her face obviously laughing at something he had just said. It was the naked longing in her eyes that shocked her, though. His brooding, good looks were half hidden beneath a head full of thick, slightly too long dark curls as he looked down at Rosa, her mother. He was dressed in a plain shirt, half tucked into a pair of loose fitting, dark trousers. His sleeves were rolled up and on his feet he had a pair of boots that looked like they had seen better days. Strong worker’s hands gripped the wide, handlebars of an old-fashioned bike, its big wheels denoting its era.

  The light surrounding the couple in the picture was dappled by sunshine peeping through the leafy arbour they were wandering beneath. This, their obviously private moment had been captured forever in a photograph that had the title Midsummer Lovers scrawled across the bottom left-hand corner of it. Her mother’s face was positively luminous Kitty realised, unable to tear her eyes away from the picture. “Oh, Mum.” She whispered aloud to the empty room for the second time that afternoon. It struck her then that she had never seen her mother look at her father the way in which she was looking at this stranger in the photo. Was that kind of blatant adoration the sole domain of the very young, she wondered, knowing that nobody who had ever been hurt or let down would ever be able to love with such an obvious unguardedness. It had been a long time since she had looked at anyone with that kind of heart on your sleeve openness and after Damien she doubted she ever would again.

  “What’s your story, Rosa?” Kitty closed her eyes. It was too much to take in. All these years of not knowing and now this photograph. It was a clue to her mother’s past and yet at the same time it told her absolutely nothing. All she knew now, was that at sixteen, she had been so bold as to be in some small town in France with a bloke whom she was clearly besotted. Did she even want to know the story behind this picture? Her mother obviously had her reasons for never talking about the first nineteen years of her life.

  As a child, Kitty had been curious but not bothered about what her mother had done before she’d married and before she had entered her life. For one thing, she simply could not imagine any other existence of importance for Rosa than that of being her mother and her father’s wife. That had changed though when the hormones had come home to roost, and she had begun to resent the secrecy behind Rosa’s past. As a teenager, she’d desperately wanted to know her maternal history. She’d imagined the worst no matter how many times her mother assured her there were no skeletons hidden away in her closet. Mean Nuns hadn't reared her in a cold stone convent or anything like that; it was just a past that was not worth revisiting. This vague, hand sweeping reply had not satisfied Kitty in the slightest, but her mother would not be swayed to confide in her nor would her father whom she could normally twist around her little finger. Eventually, she ran out of steam and had to let it go, exhausted from her years of pent-up teenage frustration.

  Now as a woman in her early thirties, Kitty’s romantic notions of where her mother had come from had faded to give way to thoughts that perhaps she had been abused as a child. For all Rosa’s vague hand sweeping and bravado when the topic of her childhood was raised, she couldn’t help but think perhaps she had been the daughter of a poor Magdalene girl. Despite what she said, maybe she’d spent her early years slaving in the laundry of an Irish convent. It had happened to others after all. Perhaps this was why she wouldn’t speak of her childhood. She simply did not know, and so she had come to nurture a quiet acceptance that her mother hadn’t just been her mother, she had been a person with a right to privacy. She couldn’t help but think though, that with Rosa having passed away the rules must now have changed.

  A conversation she’d held with Rosa as a child began to run through her head as though she had just pushed play on an old video recorder. The image of them both in the kitchen of Rose Cottage was vivid. She could see in her mind’s eye that the bay window, a focal point of the room was fogged up with steam from the sink full of dishes her mother was standing in front of. It blocked her view out to their sprawling garden that as a child had seemed to go on forever. This illusion she knew was due to the low stone wall that encased the bottom of their garden. On the other side of the wall were fields that in summer glowed gold with rapeseed and in winter wore a snowy eiderdown. For the most part, their home with its front garden full of vibrant blooms in the summer and twiggy branches that would tap at the window in winter had been a happy one.

  “Tracey at school said that her mum was an air hostess before she met Mr Hennessy. Her plane used to stop in places like Disneyland,” Kitty said this from where she was sitting up at the table; school bag abandoned at her feet while she waited for the toaster to pop. Her mother was dressed casually; her glasses pushed up on the top of her head which meant she had been studying, again. She was always doing some course, textbooks would be strewn across the kitchen table and swept away as Kitty flung the back door open home from school.

  “It’s a gift to be able to learn, Kitty,” she’d say, stacking the thick tomes on the sideboard.

  Kitty thought that was a dumb thing to say because the last thing she would do when she was finally old enough to leave school was more homework. And besides, her mum never actually did anything with all that stuff she was learning about.

  “That’s nice for Mrs Hennessy I bet she enjoyed meeting Mickey and Minnie.” Rosa’s tongue in cheek reply came as she plunged her hands into the hot water and began to scrub at the dishes left over from breakfast and lunch. She had meant to tackle them well before Kitty got home. She’d gotten side-tracked again by picking up the book she was in the middle of and before she’d known it she’d heard the familiar sound of the front door banging shut. It announced her daughter’s arrival home for the day. Her answer sailed right over the top of nine-year-old Kitty’s head. She was intent on retrieving the freshly browned bread from the toaster and slathering it in butter. “You know madam if you ate properly at lunchtime you wouldn’t be so hungry when you get home. It’s no wonder you pick at your dinner when you’re stuffing yourself full of toast at this time of the day.”

  “But I’m hungry after school not at school.” Kitty had replied perfectly logically in her opinion her chest puffing up self-righteously as she added, “And Tracey doesn’t have to sit at the table until she’s cleaned her plate up. If she doesn’t like something, her mummy says she can give it to the dog. I’d rather play with my friends than eat a yucky old school dinner any day.” Her bottom lip jutted out; the conversation was not going the way she’d planned. She had thought that by telling her mother what Mrs Hennessy used to do she might have decided to tell her what it was she had done before she married her dad. She did not want to be reminded of the stinky stuff that had been plopped on her plate at lunch time. Or the unfair way in which she was never allowed to leave anything on her dinner plate, not even peas, and she hated peas thank you very much.

  Sitting there staring at her mother’s back as she bit into her toast, butter dribbling down her chin, her eyes widened as a thought popped into her head. Maybe she had been a princess once upon a time. She was pretty enough to have been one when she took her glasses off and brushed her hair properly.

  Maybe, her evil stepmother the Queen had been mean to her but then daddy had rescued her, and the stepmother had been so angry that she waved her wand and cast a spell. Just like in Sleeping Beauty, and if her m
other ever spoke of having once been a princess she’d fall asleep for a hundred years! Her mother dried her hands and left the dishes to drain. She sat down at the table with the cup of tea she’d abandoned on hearing her daughter come in. Kitty wondered if it was normal behaviour for princesses to dunk their biscuits in their tea.

  “Your friends aren’t going anywhere Kitty and you need to eat the meal provided at school if you’re to be able to pay attention in your afternoon lessons. Sure how can you expect that poor brain of yours to concentrate on learning when it’s being distracted by your rumbling tummy? As the old cock crows, the young cock learns.”

  Kitty frowned, she hated it when her mum spoke in riddles. She looked at the soggy biscuit she was about to pop in her mouth, it was only a plain old digestive, not the chocolate ones she liked. Still she wondered what her chances of both toast and a biscuit before dinner were. “It was only boring old maths this afternoon.” she answered, deciding the odds probably weren’t very good. She wished as she finished her toast that next time her mother did the shopping she would buy some of that yummy chocolate spread stuff. Tracey said she got to have that on her toast every single morning. As she chewed, she began to ponder how she could swing the conversation back round to where she wanted it to be when her mother interrupted her plotting.

  “It’s not boring old maths and boring is a word that only boring people use. Maths is very interesting when you pay attention because we use it for all sorts of everyday reasons.”

  Kitty had raised a sceptical eyebrow at her the way she had seen Tracey do to Mrs Chalmers this morning when the teacher had informed her class that dolphin’s sleep with one eye open. It had been such a cool thing to do but then that was because Tracey was so cool. She paused in her chewing to send up a silent prayer as she tried to remember to do every day, that she would be invited to the social event of the school year, Tracey’s tenth birthday. She’d given Tracey, her best Strawberry Shortcake Rubber so she was confident that guaranteed her an invite.