Forgive Me

  He smiled weakly. ‘I’ll do my best. I am glad you seem happy here. Is Tod your boyfriend?’

  ‘Yes, he is now, but only just, up until my birthday he was just a friend.’

  Ben beamed then. ‘I’m glad. I thought you might be cross that I told him about Mum. But he’s a good bloke and I couldn’t help coming out with it. He’s just what you need.’

  Ben was right, Tod was just what she needed. It was so lovely when she got home from work to have him banging on her door within five minutes to ask how her day had been, and offering to make her a cup of tea. She loved sharing a meal with him and planning to go down to the pub later, only to fall into bed and end up not making it there. All those miserable, sad nights back at The Beeches with Andrew being so nasty were all behind her now. It seemed as if her life was getting better and better.

  On Saturday morning they went shopping together and he insisted on buying a bunch of flowers for her, which choked her up. She had often looked at couples buying groceries together and felt envious at their togetherness, and she could hardly believe that at last she knew what it felt like.

  ‘You’re so easy to please.’ He laughed. ‘I hope that five or six years down the line you are still the same.’

  She knew she loved him and wanted to say so, but she didn’t quite dare, not yet. After all, they had only been an item for one whole week, but that remark seemed to confirm he felt a permanence in their relationship too.

  Word had got around at Oakley and Smithson that she had a boyfriend, and who he was, and back at work on Monday she was teased about it constantly. Pictures of hats with notes attached from the other girls, saying they’d picked this one out for her wedding, appeared on her desk. She put on her jacket one evening and found the pockets were full of confetti, and in the staff room a silly wedding-present list had been pinned up, with everything from a three-bedroom detached house to a tin opener on it. People had written their names and funny comments beside some of the items.

  But Eva didn’t tell Tod about any of this; she was afraid he’d feel he was being pushed into a corner.

  On the Friday evening Eva picked up the keys for the studio on her way home. She was really excited and expected that Tod would be ready to drive to London. But when she got home he was sunbathing on the grass in the front garden in just a pair of shorts.

  ‘How long is it going to take for you to get ready?’ she asked him. ‘I planned to go straight away, just in case it’s too awful to stay there and we need to find somewhere else.’

  He didn’t get up, just grinned at her. ‘I don’t fancy being in London for the weekend if it’s going to be good weather. Let’s leave it till next weekend?’

  Eva felt she’d just had her balloon popped. ‘But I’m really excited to see the studio. We don’t have to be in it all weekend, we could go to one of the parks with a picnic,’ she pleaded.

  ‘But I’ve already told the lads we’d be going down the pub tonight. Josh is having a party tomorrow night too. I wouldn’t want to miss that.’

  Not wanting to look possessive or demanding, Eva swallowed her disappointment and managed to force a smile. ‘What if I go to London by train tomorrow on my own then?’ she suggested. ‘I’m dying to see the place and I don’t think I could stand to wait another week.’

  ‘Will you be back for the party?’ he asked.

  That wasn’t the reply she’d expected. She’d thought once he realized that her heart was set on seeing the studio he would change his mind and go with her. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll feel much like it after a long day in London. Especially if there’s a lot of cleaning to do. But you go anyway.’

  He got up and kissed her. His body was warm, silky and smelled of suntan lotion, and she immediately felt aroused.

  ‘I won’t enjoy the party without you there too,’ he said, nuzzling at her neck with his lips.

  ‘That’s a fib, you’ll have far more fun without me.’ She laughed, only too happy to forgive him anything when he made her feel dizzy with desire. ‘But if you can bear to leave the sun for now, I could show you some fun things to do indoors.’

  Eva caught the train to London shortly after seven the following morning. She hadn’t slept very well because she was nervous about finding her way around London on her own. She hadn’t been there more than five times, and always with her mother. She was very excited to see the studio of course, but it would have been so much more fun if Tod had come with her.

  She had hoped he would change his mind at the last minute, but he didn’t even stir when she took a shower, so she crept out without waking him. In a small wheeled suitcase she had packed a variety of cleaning materials, tea bags, bin liners and other essentials, plus some old jeans and a T-shirt to work in. She would take some photos before she moved or cleaned anything, so she could show Tod when she got back.

  Paddington Station was extremely busy and, as she was apprehensive at finding her way on the tube, she got a taxi to Pottery Lane in Holland Park.

  Olive had told her that Holland Park was a smart area with big houses but warned her that the smaller side roads going down towards Ladbroke Grove were very different. She said she had lived near there during the 1970s and parts were quite squalid, so Eva wasn’t to expect too much. She added that she thought the studio might be just a couple of rooms above a garage.

  As the taxi took her through Notting Hill and on down to tree-lined Holland Park Avenue, Eva was pleased to see that the big houses Olive had spoken of all looked very similar to those in the best parts of Cheltenham. There were restaurants, a couple of trendy gift-type shops and a delicatessen too. As the taxi turned off into Portland Road the houses were slightly smaller and terraced, the front doors opening straight on to the pavement with no gardens, but they were still very smart with black painted railings.

  She assumed that the taxi still had quite a way to go, so when the driver pulled up suddenly by a pub called The Prince of Wales, she was taken by surprise.

  ‘That’s Pottery Lane,’ he said, glancing at her over his shoulder and pointing straight ahead up a much narrower street which went off at an angle. ‘It’s difficult to stop there, it’s too narrow.’

  Eva thought for a second he’d made a mistake, for although the houses in the narrow street were tiny and humble compared with those behind her, they certainly weren’t squalid. It had the look of a mews, because some of the houses had been converted with a garage beneath them. She could see they’d been built in the last century as workers’ houses, and many of them were still just plain yellow brick, but some had been painted white or pastel shades, and it looked like a very desirable place to live. The street sign confirmed she had been brought to the right place.

  After paying the driver she stood for a little while just looking down the street. She hadn’t for one moment considered how much her legacy might be worth. It was enough that she’d been left something. But even though she knew nothing about London house prices, she could tell this area was way out of the league of ordinary people. The quality shops she’d seen, the number of BMWs, Mercedes and other smart cars parked on Portland Road, all pointed to this being a yuppie ghetto.

  But No. 7 stood out like a rotten tooth in a row of healthy ones. Upstairs there was one huge grimy window, when almost every other house in the row had two or three smaller windows which were in proportion to the building. There was a garage or workshop beneath, a front door to the left of it and a small window too. The doors were battered and the grey paint was peeling off; the little window was so thick with grime she couldn’t see through it.

  Taking a deep breath she put the key in the lock on the front door and turned it, but there appeared to be something behind the door preventing it from opening. An image of a body lying behind it sprang into her mind. But telling herself that was stupid, she slid her hand around the crack. To her relief it was only a mountain of mail which she was able to push aside.

  An appalling fetid smell and the buzzing of flies greeted her, making h
er stomach turn over. She froze momentarily, nervous of going any further.

  With her hand over her nose she went in. It was very dark and she had to open the front door again to see. To her right was the wall of the garage with a connecting door, but to her left and straight ahead appeared to be just one big room. As she edged her way gingerly forward she saw pinpricks of light and realized that the window right at the back was boarded up.

  The whole floor area was strewn with rubbish: paper, takeaway food containers, old cardboard boxes, cigarette ends, beer cans and bottles.

  She stood on the spot, terrified that the smell was something far worse than decaying food and afraid to take a step further for fear of what she might step on. But as her eyes adjusted to the gloom she saw an open-tread staircase to her right, set against the back wall of the garage. She also saw that all the walls were covered floor to ceiling in black graffiti.

  Her initial reaction was to back away. She had never seen or smelled anything so appalling; it even made the seedy rooms of the friends she’d visited during her goth period look like palaces. But she knew if she did back off now, she’d only have to come back some other time and deal with it.

  She tried the light switch but no light came on, and her heart sank even further.

  It seemed to her that squatters must have got in, for surely no ordinary tenant would leave a place in such a state. The only piece of furniture still intact was an ancient deck chair. Other pieces – chairs, a table and remnants of a chest of drawers – had been roughly chopped up.

  The smell made her gag as she edged her way forward through the mess. The kitchen area was in the left-hand corner by the boarded window. To the right was a back door, but the glass was broken in that too and boarded over. The door lock was very stiff, and it took her several attempts to turn it. But as she opened it, and light flooded in, the room looked even more hideous.

  The kitchen cupboards had been ripped out, leaving only a filthy sink unit and an equally filthy electric cooker. Eva gingerly turned on the tap and was relieved to find that the water hadn’t been turned off.

  With a sinking heart, she tried to recall the photographs of herself and her mother that had been taken here some nineteen years ago. But though she did remember one where her mother was wearing a vivid green jump suit, and a matching band around her hair, she couldn’t remember what the background of the room looked like.

  Taking her courage in both hands, she went upstairs. The big room at the front had clearly been planned and used as an artist’s studio because of the huge window, and there were paint splatters everywhere. But there was only one narrow window at the side that opened, and the window frames looked rotten. There was still more rubbish here, including a filthy mattress.

  The smaller room at the back, however, was reasonably clear of debris, and it was decorated with a hand-painted frieze of teddy bears.

  That cheered her, because she guessed by the age of it that it had been painted by her mother, and finding a link to her early childhood was something positive.

  Finally the bathroom, and she gagged when she saw the toilet was full of excrement. She flushed it, fully expecting to find that it was blocked up. But to her great relief it wasn’t, and most of the mess disappeared. She waited till the cistern had refilled and flushed it again, breathing a sigh of relief when she saw the waste was all gone.

  The lavatory was still filthy – as were the bath and washbasin, but she felt she could deal with those.

  Olive had told her that she must read the meters, so she went back downstairs to find them. There was no gas, and the electric meter was in a spidery built-in cupboard up by the front door. She jotted down the reading before she forgot.

  The walled backyard was as rubbish-strewn as the house, but climbers from the houses on either side were tumbling over a trellis on the top of the wall, and there were plants struggling through the debris too. She didn’t think it would take too much effort to make it pretty.

  She found a key hanging on the back door, and it fitted the door through to the garage. She braced herself for more squalor but surprisingly found that it was fairly clear: just a few old empty cardboard boxes, a stepladder and an old suitcase with a broken handle.

  To gather herself she stood in the fresh air at the front door for some minutes. While she had expected an artist’s studio to be dirty and shabby, she had allowed her imagination to build up a romantic picture of a discarded easel and palette, paint brushes in pots and a worn chaise longue where models posed. But the graffiti suggested the last tenants’ attempt at art had been fuelled by drugs, and they were filthy people who had no respect for themselves, let alone someone else’s property.

  She wondered if these tenants had added to her mother’s anxiety. She had been given Flora’s old building society passbook and there had been monthly deposits of £600 up until eighteen months ago, and at that time there had been a balance of over £8,000. Since then there had been no more deposits, and Flora had made one withdrawal of £1,500 pounds in addition to smaller amounts. Eva had no idea what she’d used the large sum of money for, she could only suppose it was for repairs on her car or something similar, as there was no sign of the money being spent on the studio. She wondered why Flora hadn’t got the tenants evicted and relet it to someone who would pay the rent? Or had she seen what they’d done to it and felt defeated?

  Eva could understand that. But she wasn’t going to let it defeat her. Yet at the same time she knew the cleaning materials she’d brought with her were not enough. She needed a broom, dustpan and brush, a mop, bucket and toilet brush. And a great many more bin bags. She also thought she would try to get a Calor gas camping stove and a kettle to heat up water.

  She needed to go and buy these things but decided that, before she left, she would take photographs to show Tod just how bad it was. She didn’t think she could adequately describe how horrible it was with mere words.

  Hailing a taxi on Holland Park Avenue, she asked the driver to take her to the nearest hardware shop.

  In less than an hour she was back in another taxi. She had everything she needed, including an inflatable mattress and pump. The last purchase had made her spirits rise a little, because it would mean she and Tod would have something to sleep on when he came to see the place.

  First, she changed into her old clothes. Then she opened the front and back doors and all the windows upstairs to let some air in, then put on rubber gloves.

  The stink was coming from rotten food in takeaway cartons, and she gagged again when she saw maggots crawling over it. But she shovelled it all up into bin bags, tied them up tightly and put them in the backyard.

  Three hours later she had filled sixteen bags with rubbish, stacked the broken furniture and the mattress in the garage, and swept right through the house.

  The bathroom had been the hardest thing to clean, and it had turned her stomach imagining the kind of people who had used it. She’d heated up around six kettles of water on the little camping stove to scrub it. But the limescale remover which had been recommended to her was very efficient on both the bath and lavatory, though the fumes nearly knocked her out. She left it to work further while she cleaned the inside of the upstairs windows, and by the time she went back to the bathroom the last of the limescale had dissolved.

  She tried hard to see potential in the house while she was working, but apart from it being in a good area, and the rooms being a good size, the scale of what was needed to make it habitable was frightening. A new window was needed downstairs, not just new glass, because the frame was rotten. The cooker was disgusting, and she’d have to get new kitchen cabinets and a fridge. What if the immersion heater upstairs didn’t work, or the roof leaked? And who could she go to for advice on these things?

  With her savings she had almost £7,000. But although she’d thought before she got here that this sum made her rich, she realized now that it wouldn’t go very far. She couldn’t even let the place to someone else until she’d made it h
abitable again.

  Yet however horrible and squalid the house was, it must have been important to her mother, or she would have sold it long ago. It was strange to think of herself living here as a baby: taking her first steps, toilet trained in the bathroom, and playing out in the backyard. Had Flora been happy here?

  Later, Eva went along to the cafe in Portland Road for tea and sandwiches, and then took a little walk around the neighbouring streets.

  However disheartened she was by the project before her, she couldn’t help but be cheered by the area. There was a pretty park nearby, and she found the huge bottle-shaped kiln which gave her road its name. A middle-aged man she questioned told her that it was the only one of its kind left in London. He said that back in the eighteenth century the area had been known as the Pottery and Piggeries as so many people kept pigs here.

  She bought a can of lemonade and some apples, then went back to the house and sat down on the floor by the open window in the little bedroom to think while she heated another kettle of water to mop all the floors. The sun had been shining on the front of the house when she arrived here, and now it was shining in the back bedroom and on the backyard. Looking out of the window, she could see into the neighbours’ yards. The one on her right was a very pretty courtyard, beautifully paved and with lots of exotic-looking palm-type plants in tubs. The one to her left just had white painted walls, and a table and chairs painted blue. She wished she could see into their houses to see what they’d done with them.

  She wanted to feel excited at the challenge of renovating this house, but instead she felt mostly dread as the problems appeared insurmountable. The only real way they could be tackled was by moving here. But how could she do that when she worked in Cheltenham? And then there was Tod. She doubted he’d want to come here with her. But even if he did, it wasn’t just decoration that this place needed. It required building skills: carpentry, electrical and plumbing.