Looking For Lucy

by Julie Houston

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’ve gone very quiet and a bit pale suddenly?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’ I smiled, pushing all thoughts of Lucy, for this evening at least, to the back of my mind. ‘Would you like some apple tart?’

  As I found cream to go with the tart and poured Rafe a coffee, he excused himself once again to make more phone calls.

  ‘As soon as those jeans are anything like dry I’m going to have to dash.’ He frowned, sitting back down at the kitchen table and pouring a puddle of cream onto his pudding.

  ‘Syria, you said? That must be horribly dangerous as well as distressing?’

  ‘Well, it’s not a bed of roses…’ He paused to eat. ‘Bloody hell, this tart is good too. No wonder this place is doing well.’ He glanced around at the kitchen taking in its industrial sized hobs, cookers, steel sinks and fridge.

  ‘It’s terribly early days,’ I said. ‘I think we’re just about breaking even so far. A lot of its success is obviously due to it all being owned by David…’

  ‘Yes, Henderson is certainly a shrewd one. Knows what he wants and goes out to get it.’ Rafe looked directly at me, holding my gaze for a few seconds and I could feel myself redden.

  ‘So, Syria?’ I asked, changing the subject. I had an awful feeling Rafe knew all about my thing for David Henderson and it suddenly all seemed a bit silly, a bit adolescent.

  Rafe wiped his mouth on his napkin and reached for the cafetière. ‘Syria…?’ He sighed. ‘Syria is a bloody awful mess. Syria is full of remarkable, horrific, inspiring, frightening stories.’

  ‘But aren’t you terrified going there? I’m actually amazed they let you in to report? I mean, I thought they’d arrest you as soon as you set foot in there?’

  ‘It is getting harder and harder. When I said I was off to Manchester airport to fly to Syria, I was being flippant. I think I had my arm up a horse’s rear end at the time.’

  I laughed. ‘So where were you off?’

  ‘Beirut, in Lebanon.’

  ‘Hell, I thought that would be just as dangerous?’

  ‘Almost. Probably not quite. Once—if—you manage to get a visa from the Syrian embassy in Beirut, you are then driven up the road to Damascus. It’s about an hour to the border and another hour or so actually to the capital. You are then searched and searched and searched again by the Syrian Security Services.’

  ‘I feel frightened just talking about it,’ I said, gazing in awe at this man. Strange to think that just a few hours ago he was acting as midwife to a horse, now he was sitting eating my apple pie and, I supposed, in a few days’ time I would see him on TV, reporting from the rubble and dust that was now Syria.

  ‘The other way in is without a visa. You can try and get in over any of Syria’s borders, but most of the media and aid workers without a visa try to get in via Turkey. Just as the poor bloody refugees are leaving, heading in one direction out of Syria and into Turkey, reporters are going the other way, to try and report what’s happening in their country.’ Rafe looked at his watch. ‘And now, I really must be off.’

  While Rafe dressed in still very damp jeans, I made sure the house was secure, ran up to her room to tell a half-asleep Sophie I was driving Rafe home and grabbed the Mini’s keys.

  *

  As he unfolded his long, damp-jeaned legs from the depths of the Mini passenger seat, Rafe reached over and kissed my cheek. He held my gaze for a couple of seconds with his blue eyes and said, ‘Thank you, Clementine. I’ll be in touch.’

  I drove the two miles home, touching my cheek where’d he’d kissed it, my head so full of the events of the evening I literally thought it might burst.

  30

  ‘Oh, Clem, why the hell have you kept all this to yourself?’ Izzy paced the patio, coffee in one hand, large slab of millionaires’ shortbread in the other. ‘You have to tell Allegra. As soon as possible. This afternoon when she gets home from school.’

  I nodded miserably. ‘I know, I know. You’re absolutely right…’

  ‘I mean, what if Lucy comes back in the next few days—finds Allegra in the garden or something when you’re not actually with her? What if she tells her that you’re not her mother? That she is?’

  ‘Izzy’s right, you know, Clem,’ Mel said, pouring herself more juice before coming to sit down. Mel and Grace had both been at work at Clementine’s that morning—Mel since six-thirty—and we’d had a full on few hours cooking and serving a traditional English breakfast to twenty American tourists. They’d been booked in to eat by their upmarket travel company—en route from their hotel to Howarth and Brontë country. The mainly women tourists seemed to be under the impression the house was David Henderson’s own home and, as such, were determined to have a photograph with David, wandering into the kitchen and even upstairs and generally getting under our feet in order to try and catch him en famille.

  We’d finally managed to wave them off around eleven-thirty and the four of us were now sitting with our feet up enjoying an hour’s break in the warmth of a beautiful June day. Eric was out mowing the lawns and the heady scent of cut grass mingled with the sweet scents of alyssum, wisteria and jasmine, while the insistently spirited chatter of a couple of sparrows was in competition with the more gentle muted call from a family of wood pigeons. God, I adored this place. I was determined, even as we sat, to make sure Clementine’s was going to go from strength to strength, to make it the success that David Henderson had envisaged.

  ‘Look, Mel, I know you’re right, I should have told Allegra from day one that I wasn’t her real mother, but as time went by I’d sort of convinced myself that I was. I’ve thought of myself as her mother now for years. I am her mother. Does that make sense?’

  ‘But surely you must have known Lucy would want to have Allegra once she was able to take care of her, herself?’

  I could feel myself struggling not to cry as the others looked at me expectantly. ‘What is it with you lot, I always end up confessing my life story?’ I sniffed.

  ‘It’s because we’re your women friends and women friends have to know everything about each other. That’s what it’s all about,’ Izzy said, comfortably. ‘So, come on, what other bits have you missed telling us? Apart from the fact that you aren’t Allegra’s mother after all?’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh, Izzy.’ Mel interrupted. ‘We all have private things we might not want people to know.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Izzy said. ‘I tell everybody everything…’

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll talk,’ I said, holding up my hands in mock surrender. ‘When I left sixth-form college I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to go to university at some stage and my parents certainly wanted me to do that. But I’d done art at A level and really got into it so was toying with art college rather than the law degree my father had wanted me to do.’

  ‘That’s strange,’ Grace interrupted. ‘My father, who actually was a solicitor in Midhope, was expecting me to do law and go into the family firm, but I chose teaching instead…’

  ‘Fathers do have this thing about law, don’t they? So, anyway, I did a foundation year at Leeds Art College but then decided it wasn’t quite what I wanted. What I really wanted to do was go travelling. My mum and dad weren’t happy that I decided against doing a degree, but I told them I could always do one later and I set off. I did a couple of years au-pairing in Italy and Monaco and then came home before setting off for Israel. I worked on several kibbutzim and absolutely adored it…’

  ‘Israel? Wasn’t that dangerous?’ Mel frowned. ‘I didn’t think you could go and volunteer to work there anymore with all the unrest in that area?’

  ‘As long as you went through a volunteer agency and were sensible about security, it was fine. It really was. Both my kibbutzim were well away from the main problem areas and I just loved it all. After I’d picked pears and mangoes and worked with the hens, I said I wanted to work in the kitchens and, because most of the v
olunteers preferred to be outside, the kibbutzniks were happy to let me work preparing food. It was there I really began to love to cook—wasn’t fazed by cooking for huge amounts of people.’

  ‘I’m surprised you came back. To wet, miserable Midhope I mean,’ Izzy said, putting the final bit of cake into her mouth. ‘Did you learn to make this delicious stuff there?’

  ‘I fell in love…’

  ‘Ah, I knew there’d be a man in there somewhere,’ Grace laughed. ‘There always is.’

  I smiled too. ‘I met him on a trip up to Haifa, in one of the cafés, just as he was planning on leaving Israel to move to London to work in one of the hotels there. He was a chef—his uncle had a very upmarket restaurant in Haifa—but he wanted experience of working in England. When he left for London I went with him, but I really hated living in London and was missing Lucy so, after just a couple of months, he agreed to move up to Leeds as long as he could get a job in a top restaurant there. That’s how we both ended up in La Toque Blanche—him as chef and me as general dogsbody to begin with. I was given more and more responsibility, until I was cooking like the rest of the chefs. It was a wonderful time.’

  ‘And where was Lucy all this time? What was she doing?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Lucy didn’t do sixth form—in fact, messed about so much in the fifth form she came out with virtually nothing. She was driving Mum and Dad mad, staying out, drinking, smoking dope…’

  ‘You really are quite different, aren’t you?’ Izzy mused.

  ‘Anyway, when she was only seventeen, Lucy met some guy down in town and went off with him. I only met him a couple of times—I reckon he was a dealer—and really didn’t like him, but Lucy was totally under his spell. Weird really because Lucy had never done anything anyone had told her to do and here she was, doing anything and everything Samir asked her. They went to live in Sheffield while I was at art college, but we tried to see each other as often as I could. Problem was, every time we met up he’d come too. He was terribly controlling, but she was obsessed with him.’

  ‘What about your parents?’ Izzy asked. ‘Didn’t they see much of her?’

  ‘Not really. She basically kept out of their way except when she and Samir fell out. I reckon he used to hit her but she never would admit to it. On three occasions she went back home and she really did try to be good and live under Mum and Dad’s rules and try to find work. She actually worked in the Co-op in our village for a while, but I wasn’t at home anymore—this is when I was au-pairing in Italy—and she would have found it really hard without me. And then Samir would contact her and she’d be off with him again.’

  ‘So this Samir is Allegra’s father?’ Mel asked.

  ‘No, no,’ I frowned. ‘All this with Samir was before she was even twenty. And then I went off to Israel and when I’d been there six months Mum and Dad paid for her to come out and join me.’

  ‘That must have been really good for you both then?’ Grace asked hopefully.

  I closed my eyes as I remembered how awful it had been. ‘From day one Lucy thought she’d come to a holiday camp. Working on a kibbutz is bloody hard work. You’re up at four in the morning before it gets too hot and it’s hard, physical graft doing some pretty monotonous jobs. She wouldn’t get up in the morning, did as little as she possibly could and spent most evenings drinking.’

  ‘Ew, not good for you then?’ Mel sympathised.

  ‘No, it was awful because I felt responsible for her, and embarrassing as the kibbutz community got really fed up with her. They’re really hard-working, all the Israelis who have decided to make their home on a kibbutz, and just don’t suffer fools gladly. Lucy and I ended up arguing and she changed her ticket after only six weeks and flew home. That’s when I moved to my second kibbutz.’

  ‘Blimey, you could write a book about this,’ Grace said. ‘So what then?’

  ‘By the time Ariav and I had moved up to Leeds, Lucy was on heroin and was working the streets of Midhope. Ariav would come with me down to Emerald Street and we’d find her, give her some money, take her for something to eat but we just couldn’t get through to her. She wouldn’t let us try to help her to get off the drugs.’ I looked round at these lovely women who were my friends, at their sympathetic faces but they really had no idea what life was like for the girls who regularly sold themselves in order to get drugs.

  ‘Ariav and I had always hoped to go travelling again—we both had itchy feet—but I hated the idea of leaving Lucy, and I kept making excuses not to set off.’ I took a deep breath. ‘And then… and then I found I was pregnant and basically Ariav didn’t want to know. Said I’d have to get rid of it. But I wanted the baby—wanted Ariav’s baby. I told him I was going to keep it. I was convinced he loved me enough to stay with me and our baby—but, boy, did I get that wrong.’

  ‘Oh no, you poor thing,’ Mel said, frowning. ‘What happened?’

  ‘He buggered off, basically. Upped and left. To this day, I’ve no idea where he went or where he is now…’

  ‘And the baby?’

  ‘I had the abortion Ariav wanted me to have.’

  I’ve always reckoned there is no class barrier to those who go ahead with terminations; one can be from the lowest echelons of society or right at the top, but if a baby’s not wanted, or the pregnancy can’t go ahead for any reason, it’s totally irrelevant who or what your background is. There was no look of horror on these women’s faces, no condemnation of my actions, just sympathy.

  ‘I’ve never forgiven myself for ending the life of my own unborn child and find it a bit difficult to talk about…’ I said, swallowing hard so as not to cry.

  ‘More coffee, Clem, and one of these brownies,’ Izzy urged, patting my arm, and making me smile.

  ‘Is that your answer to everything?’ I sniffed, leaning back as Izzy filled my mug.

  ‘Pretty much,’ Izzy said. ‘Or gin. Or having pornographic thoughts about Tom Hardy… So, go on, what then?’

  ‘I carried on living in Leeds and working at La Toque Blanche, working like a maniac to try and forget both Ariav and the baby I’d got rid of. But it just wasn’t the same without him and I was seriously considering setting off again—I fancied South America this time. And then Lucy turned up out of the blue at my flat. Said she was pregnant and where should she go for a termination?’

  ‘Gosh,’ Grace said. ‘Isn’t it amazing how quickly women get pregnant when they don’t want to? And when you’re desperate… I mean, that’s the main reason Dan and I split up, because I couldn’t get pregnant.’

  ‘Lucy was a good five months pregnant with Allegra before she realised she actually was pregnant.’

  ‘You see, I just don’t understand that,’ Izzy frowned. ‘I knew from day one with all my three that I was pregnant with them…’

  ‘Yes, but you’re a doctor and not a drug addict, Izzy,’ I said. ‘Lucy was so thin, wasn’t menstruating every month and was in a world of her own a lot of the time. By the time she realised she was pregnant it was almost too late for a termination. To be honest, I assumed she’d miscarry naturally what with the drugs and the mess her body was in.’

  ‘But she didn’t,’ Mel smiled.

  I smiled back. ‘No, thank goodness, or Allegra wouldn’t be here today.’

  ‘But I don’t understand how a heroin addict can produce a healthy baby?’ Grace asked. ‘And surely social services would be involved?’

  ‘Lucy suddenly decided she really wanted this baby. I think she saw it as something of her own to love; that our real mother had given her away, and she wasn’t about to do the same. Typical Lucy, she just didn’t think any of it through as to how she was going to look after it. Once I got Lucy to come with me to my GP, all hell let loose. Social services were in there from the start doing pre-birth assessments as to what should happen to the baby once it was born. I persuaded her to come and live with me in my flat in Leeds—I was lonely living by myself after Ariav disappeared—and funnily enough, those final months of her pre
gnancy were good. She behaved herself, drank the gallons of milk and fruit and vitamins I bought, slept a lot and watched TV. It was a bit like being little girls again when we did everything together.’

  ‘So who’s Allegra’s father?’ Grace asked.

  I hesitated. ‘Well, in the words of Lucy, “No bloody idea”.’

  ‘What a mess.’ Mel frowned. ‘So, do you think part of you was looking after this unborn baby because you’d regretted terminating your own, Clem?’

  ‘You don’t need to be a damned psychologist to work that one out,’ Izzy snorted. ‘I bet that’s how you felt, Clem, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it was,’ I sighed. ‘Everything wasn’t going too badly at all. Even Mum, excited I suppose at the thought of being a grandmother, was back there for her.’ I laughed. ‘We used to go round to Mum and Dad’s for tea, and then Dad would drive us down to the station and we’d get the train back to Leeds. Social services backed off a bit and Mum and I assumed they’d help Lucy get her own accommodation once the baby was born…’

  ‘And? Did they?’

  I sighed. ‘Lucy went off one afternoon when I was at work and didn’t come back. She took the train to Midhope and went down to Emerald Street to see her old druggy mates. She started using again…’

  Mel was horrified. ‘What, even when she was pregnant?’

  ‘Yep. I think she thought she’d been good, and just one bit wouldn’t harm her, especially so late in the pregnancy. She didn’t stick at one hit and a couple of weeks later went into premature labour. Her mates were sensible enough to ring for an ambulance and got her to hospital. Social services were swarming like flies; they got in touch with me, and Mum and I went to be with her.’

  ‘And was the baby… I mean, was Allegra OK?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Allegra was born a heroin addict.’