by Pat Herbert
“How sad for you – especially now that your husband is dead,” observed Jerry. “But what about Cathy’s real father? Does he know? Does he keep in touch?”
Sophie lowered her gaze. “Can we talk privately for a few minutes, Bernard?”
Jerry stood up at once. “I’d love to look round your garden and the swimming pool. May I?” he asked tactfully.
When they were alone, Sophie topped up Bernard’s teacup and seated herself in the chair vacated by Jerry. She gazed gently into Bernard’s eyes. “I need to tell you something, and I’m not sure how you’re going to take it.”
Bernard sipped his tea. “Go on, I’m listening.”
“There’s no way to break this to you gently. So I’ll just come out and say it. Cathy’s your daughter.”
“Mine?” Bernard nearly spilt his tea as he replaced the cup in the saucer. “Mine you say? But how?”
“How do you think?”
“Do you mean she was conceived while we were at university?”
“Of course. I thought you would have understood why I left in such a hurry. I thought you would have read between the lines of the note I left you.”
Bernard had never, in his wildest dreams, thought that was the reason she had left him. He sat there, trying to come to terms with the fact that, for all these years, he had been a father without ever knowing it. He also had to come to terms with his feelings for the woman now seated beside him. She was the woman he had worshipped and loved throughout the long years of his celibacy. Now he realised he had loved a mere figment of his imagination. The woman in the room with him now was a stranger.
37
“Is it okay if I come back in now? Have you finished your private conversation?” Jerry asked, looking from one to the other.
“Of course,” said Sophie, getting up and coming over to him. “Come in. I think Bernard would like to talk to you.” She walked past him out of the room. Jerry noticed, out of the corner of his eye, she had been crying. He walked over to Bernard and sat down beside him. He, too, looked close to tears.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
Bernard reached for his handkerchief and blew his nose. “I’ve just had rather a shock, Jerry. I don’t know where to begin.”
“Begin at the beginning, as they say,” said Jerry with an encouraging smile. “That’s the best plan.”
Bernard gave him a thin smile. “Well, you know the beginning already.”
“Yes, I do. Is there an ending now?”
“Well, hardly that. Anyway, you know I told you she left me suddenly after two years together?”
“Yes, of course I do. Do you know the reason now?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what is it?” Jerry prompted, obviously impatient as Bernard remained silent for several moments.
“Can’t you guess?” Bernard asked finally.
“I’m not a mind reader.”
“Sorry, Jerry. I’m just finding it hard to put into words. The reason Sophie left me was because she was pregnant with my child.” The last sentence was said in staccato, each word pronounced with stark solemnity.
Bernard continued to wipe his eyes and blow his nose.
“My God!”
“It’s a bit of a facer, isn’t it?”
“It certainly is. But why on earth would she have left you if she was going to have your baby? She loved you, didn’t she? And there was no doubt you were in love with her. What a waste!”
“I just can’t begin to comprehend her motive for abandoning me and bringing up the child on her own.”
“Well, I suppose back in the mid-nineteen-forties, it was a social disgrace to have a baby out of wedlock....”
“But she must have known I would have married her like a shot. She knew I wanted to....”
Jerry put his arm around the old man’s shoulders. “So you lived most of your life not even knowing you were a father. I don’t think I’d ever forgive that woman if it were me.”
“Well, you’re not me, are you?” There was an accusatory look on Bernard’s face. “However, I don’t blame you for feeling like that. I don’t think I can forgive her, either. Certainly not yet, anyway.”
“So, what are you going to do now? Meet your daughter? I mean, Mrs Miles-Harris can’t stop you, can she? You’ve a right.”
“I don’t think Sophie would stop me but she’s obviously in no fit state to meet a strange man claiming to be her long-lost father.”
“But you must meet her,” insisted Jerry, “and, you never know, it may make all the difference to her to finally know who her father is. Think about it, it’s not only you in this.”
“I know, Jerry. But I’m so nervous. And, by my reckoning, she’d be in her mid-sixties now. To think I never knew her when she was young and growing up....”
“With all due respect to you, Bernard, I think Sophie didn’t treat you well at all.”
Bernard sighed. “She must have had her reasons.”
“Why don’t you ask her? Don’t leave it like this – you can’t!”
“No, I suppose....”
Just then, Sophie came back into the room. Jerry got up and headed for the kitchen. “I think you two have some unfinished business. I’ll make a fresh pot of tea. Do you have anything cold to drink, Mrs Miles-Harris?”
Sophie, now quite dry-eyed, gave him a sad smile. “Call me Sophie, please. There’s coke and orange juice, I think. And water, of course. Help yourself.”
“Tea for two coming up,” he said, leaving the room and closing the door quietly. He glanced over at Bernard as he did so, mouthing something at him.
Bernard, who hadn’t understood exactly what Jerry was communicating to him, had got the general drift. He gave Sophie a wary look as she came and sat down beside him again.
“I think I owe you an explanation,” she said.
“It’s hard to remember everything exactly after all these years,” she began, “but most of that awful time is etched on my memory. Everything was fine, except I started to be sick in the mornings. I thought nothing of it, at first, thinking I’d just caught a bug or had some sort of food poisoning. The last thing I thought was that I was going to have a baby. Can you believe it? But I was so innocent, I didn’t even connect it with being pregnant, even though I hadn’t had a period for three months. Sorry, Bernard, if this is embarrassing for you.”
“Not at all,” he assured her. “I should think I know the facts of life by now. Carry on.”
“Anyway, it was Lallagy – you remember her? – one of our flatmates? She was always singing and being generally noisy.”
“Oh, yes. I remember accusing her of being too cheerful in the mornings.”
“That’s her,” smiled Sophie. “She was the one who told me. Said it was as plain as a pikestaff. And even when the doctor confirmed it, I still didn’t quite believe it. Everything was about to fall apart. You – me – my future – our future. When it finally sunk in, I knew there was no question of ‘getting rid of it’, as Lallagy suggested. The very idea was abhorrent. All I could think, then, was I’d have to leave university at once and go home to my parents. There wasn’t any other choice or, at least, that’s how I saw it at the time. I couldn’t tell you. No, Bernard, hear me out. I knew, if I told you, you’d want to marry me, and two lives would be have been ruined instead of one.”
“Don’t you think I had a right to make that decision for myself?”
“Maybe, now. Looking back. But you can’t turn back the clock. At the time, all I knew was I loved you enough to set you free. You’d never have been able to become a vicar, would you? And it was your dearest wish. Just think what people would have said if they knew you’d got a fellow student pregnant out of wedlock.”
“That’s ridiculous! We’d have been married long before the baby was born. No one would have been any the wiser.”
“But you hadn’t got your degree! You would have had to leave university – a
t least that’s what I thought at the time. No, the only thing for me to do was go home. I knew my parents would go up the wall, but there was no help for it. So I just wrote you a note and left it on your pillow. You’d already left for a ten o’clock lecture, so I packed my suitcase and walked out of your life.”
It was a melodramatic statement, and Sophie paused, waiting for Bernard to assimilate what she had said so far. Then she continued.
“There was a dreadful scene with my parents when I got home. Worse, even, than I’d expected. But, in the end, they supported me through my pregnancy. They were the kind of people who cared what other people thought and, back then, it was a social stigma to have a baby ‘on the other side of the blanket’, so I was very grateful to them that they didn’t turn me out. And, when Cathy was born, it was all forgotten. They were such proud grandparents.
“All was well, for a while. It wasn’t apparent that Cathy was subnormal and, by the time we found out, there was no question of putting her into a special home. So I brought her up with the help of my parents, and I eventually consigned you to history. I had to. You were better off without me, I was convinced. Anyway, as you’d made no attempt to find me, I began to think you hadn’t really cared about me so much, after all. It’s all right, Bernard, I know now I was wrong about that, but at the time that’s what I thought. I knew you didn’t know where my parents lived, but it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility for you to find me if you’d wanted to enough.
“Water under the bridge now, of course. Things could have been different, I suppose, if you’d turned up on my parents’ doorstep.”
Bernard looked her in the eyes. His usually soft brown eyes had taken on a steely hardness. “I nearly came to see you, Sophie. I found your parents’ address easily enough. I remembered you’d told me they lived in Chesterfield, and it only took a quick look in the telephone directory to get the exact address.”
“But you didn’t come?”
“No, and for that I shall be eternally sorry.”
“Never mind, Bernard. As I said, water under the bridge. When Charlie came along, it was like a miracle. I’d reached the end of my tether with being a single mum. Cathy, as you can imagine, wasn’t the easiest of children, and my parents could only do so much. When he proposed, I just thanked God for him. He was prepared to take on the care of Cathy, who was then about ten-years-old. He had a good job with a Chartered Accountancy firm in the city of London and, for many years, we were all very happy.
“Until we moved to 57 Bockhampton Road, and I curse the day.”
There was little more to tell after that. Jerry, who had been discreetly making tea all this time, put his head round the door. He saw the two old dears sitting together silently. He coughed.
“Oh, do come in, young man,” said Sophie briskly. “Where’s that tea?”
Bernard wanted Sophie to return with them to London by the next available flight, but Sophie pointed out that it would be quite impossible to up and leave just like that. There were arrangements to be made, people to notify and friends to say farewell to.
Her husband’s funeral had taken place only the day before and she still had to collect his ashes from the crematorium. She was planning to scatter them on Hampstead Heath, the place where he had lived as a boy and been happiest.
“Well, as soon as you can, then,” said Bernard. “Once you’ve scattered the ashes, maybe you can take me to meet my daughter?”
“Oh, Bernard, you’re running away with yourself. I don’t think you can just turn up out of the blue without some sort of prior preparation. Don’t forget she’s not well and still in the institution.”
“And that’s going to change,” he said with determination.
“What d’you mean?”
“No more electric shocks for her, not if I have anything to do with it.”
“We must let the experts know what’s best, Bernard.”
“I think Bernard’s right,” chipped in Jerry. “You just put her in there out of your way so you could move to Spain.”
“Jerry!”
“Sorry, Bernard, but I have to speak my mind about this. I’m sorry, Mrs Miles-Harris, I know you haven’t had an easy time, but Bernard has suffered too. And not telling him about the baby was just plain wrong.”
Sophie looked at him severely, then her face softened. “You’re talking from a twenty-first century perspective, young man. This was the nineteen-forties.”
There was an awkward silence. “‘The past is another country – they do things differently there’,” quoted Bernard into it.
Suddenly, the phone sprang into life. Both Bernard and Sophie seemed unable to move, so Jerry went to answer it.
“Is Mr or Mrs Miles-Harris there, please?” said an official-sounding voice.
“There’s a man asking for you or your husband,” he said, passing the receiver to Sophie.
“Hello? This is Mrs Miles-Harris speaking. What can I do for you?”
“This is Dr Mallory of Ticehurst Priory here. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news, Mrs Miles-Harris.”
The two men watched her in growing alarm. Her face had turned ashen and she looked about to faint. However, she remained upright, as she listened to her caller.
“I see,” she said finally. “Well thank you, Doctor, for informing me. I shall catch the next flight to the UK tonight and be with you as soon as I can. In the meantime, have you told the police?”
Jerry and Bernard were standing beside her now.
“I understand,” she said, “but there is one place you should concentrate your search, Doctor. Tell the police to go to 57 Bockhampton Road, Wandsworth. That was her last family home. Try there – now!”
She slammed the receiver down and turned to her companions. “That was the Priory where Cathy is being treated,” she told them. “They tell me she’s run away. She wasn’t sectioned so she was free to come and go. Apparently, she’s been gone for several hours and the police have been searching for her without any luck.”
“So you suggested that she might have gone back to her old home?” Bernard asked.
“It seems the most logical place. She’s probably missing me and Charlie. How could we leave her alone there for so long? What a wicked and cruel thing to do!”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Sophie,” Jerry said, obviously undergoing a slight change of heart. “The important thing now is to find her.”
“But she could be anywhere – I only hope she’s at Bockhampton Road.”
“And I only hope she’s not,” said Bernard sternly. “She could be in grave danger if she’s gone there. Have you thought about that?”
Sophie began to cry in rage and frustration. “Just book the tickets, can’t you? We must be on that plane tonight.”
Jerry pressed a number on his mobile and did as he was bid.
Three hours later they were on a plane bound for Gatwick, estimated time of arrival: ten fifteen at night. The three companions sat in silence. Sophie cradled her husband’s ashes in her lap. Jerry, armed with the necessary paperwork, had somehow managed to get them from the crematorium before they left. She had wept with gratitude as he had handed her the urn.
“I don’t deserve friends like you,” she had wept. “I only hope my darling’s safe.”
They had rung the Priory before leaving to catch their flight, but they were told Cathy hadn’t gone to Bockhampton Road or, if she had, wasn’t there now. In one way they were relieved but, in another, they didn’t know where else she could be. The sooner they were on English soil the better.
38
In only a few hours, although to them it seemed like an eternity, they were outside the Ticehurst Priory where Cathy Harris-Miles had spent the last few years. It was a pleasant, white building, looking more like a seaside hotel than a mental institution. Situated just outside the pleasant village of Ticehurst on the Sussex-Kent border, most people, apart from the villagers themselves, assumed it was some sort of guest
house. There was no hint of Victorian institutional gloom about it, and the only clue to its true purpose was in the wrought iron gates that were invisible from the road, hidden by ornate evergreens. Sophie pressed the bell set in the wall by the side of them.
The trio were soon buzzed in and immediately met by a worried-looking Dr Mallory, his remaining strands of hair awry, and his small, grey eyes ringed by dark circles.
“We thought we’d cracked it when you told us she’d probably gone back to her old home,” he said, shaking Sophie by the hand. He looked enquiringly at the old gentleman and the much younger man by her side.
“Forgive me,” she said, “This is a young friend of mine, Jeremy Bracegirdle, and this is – this is – Cathy’s father.” Bernard shook the doctor’s hand vigorously.
“But this isn’t Mr Miles-Harris.” Dr Mallory looked stunned.
“No, Bernard Paltoquet, Reverend Bernard Paltoquet.” Sophie announced him as if he was James Bond.
The ‘Reverend’ bit didn’t seem to have impressed the psychiatrist at all.
“Sorry, Doctor,” Sophie continued, “this gentleman is my daughter’s natural father. My husband was her adoptive father.”
“Oh, I see. Is your husband not with you today?”
“No, I’m afraid he died last week,” she told him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “He was a good man. I’m really sorry about your daughter’s disappearance. We didn’t keep her under lock and key, and she never ever made an attempt to leave before. We’re at a loss to know where she could be.”
Bernard spoke up. “So, are you telling us she isn’t at Bockhampton Road?”
The doctor eyed him with a hint of suspicion. “The police told us that the place was completely deserted. There was no sign of life.”
“But did they go inside?” Bernard persisted.
“No. The owner wasn’t at home.”
“No, because I’m here,” Jerry interjected.
“Oh, right.” The poor doctor looked even more bewildered now. “Anyway, the police were satisfied there was no one there.”
