Forgive Me

‘The snake is at the centre of your anxiety,’ she said. ‘You have recently experienced the betrayal, dishonesty and guile which he represents.’

  Eva hadn’t for one moment expected to hear anything she could relate to, and for this woman to get right to the crux of what was on her mind was astounding. But she concentrated on not showing any reaction, maintaining what she hoped was a blank expression.

  ‘This card,’ said Dena, pointing to a deer to the right of the snake, ‘represents you. The deer’s strength is its speed, sharp ears and its ability to sense danger. You are leaning on the strength of the ox and feel braver than is wise, especially when the monkey is creating mischief for you.’

  As she named the cards she touched them lightly with her index finger. She had rings on each of her fingers, and her long nails were painted blood red.

  ‘The horse is righteousness, or the law. You will be put in a position where you have to choose between what is right, knowing it will bring trouble for others, or walking away from it, for the sake of those you hold dear. I can see from the other cards that this will be the hardest choice you will ever have to make.

  ‘However, the tiger will strive to protect you, and he is very powerful. Sadly, though, he is no match for the eagle …’ She paused here, tapping the eagle card as if trying to work out this card’s place in the reading. ‘I must warn you, this is someone who seeks to hurt you. The eagle has the ability to swoop down and also soar away, suggesting to me that you will not see what is coming.’

  Eva thought this was all very dramatic and so slick – Dena had probably used the same patter to dozens of people. While the snake did appear to represent her mother, all the rest could be interpreted by almost anyone to fit problems they might be having.

  ‘Why am I the deer card?’ she asked. She saw herself as rather more of a tiger.

  ‘That position on the table is always the one which represents the person asking for a reading. The ox is the man in your life. You are compatible, each one’s strengths compensating for the other’s weakness.’

  ‘Who is the tiger?’ Eva asked.

  Madame looked hard at her. ‘It is normally a father or elder brother. In your case I think it is someone who has, or will choose to, become your protector. The bluebird there,’ she said, pointing to a very pretty card she hadn’t mentioned before, ‘represents happiness, but the position he occupies means you are unable to recognize what, or who, it is that will bring you happiness.’

  ‘And the rabbit? Eva asked.

  ‘A vulnerable family member,’ she said. ‘You have, or will have, someone who needs your help.’

  Eva assumed that was it, that the reading was over. But Dena took hold of Eva’s right hand and studied her palm.

  ‘You have more courage and determination than others credit you with,’ she said. ‘Practical, and yet sensitive and artistic too. You have in the past strived to fit in with other people, often at the expense of your own needs. ‘

  ‘Will I marry and have children?’ Eva couldn’t resist asking that.

  ‘My gift is for guiding,’ the woman said sharply. ‘I cannot see into the future. But I can see that you have lost someone close to you recently and you have many unanswered questions.’

  ‘How do I get the answers to these questions then?’

  ‘They will come, but not all will be the answers you want.’

  Eva felt unable to keep up the pretence any longer. ‘I believe you were friends with my mother, back in 1969. Flora Foyle.’

  Eva expected the woman to look surprised and delighted. But instead her face tightened and there was alarm in her dark eyes. ‘I see you have inherited her guile,’ she said sharply, losing the deep huskiness. ‘Did she send you here to try to trip me up?’

  ‘She couldn’t send me, she’s dead,’ Eva said. ‘But I suppose I should’ve introduced myself instead of getting you to do a reading for me. I’m sorry if I’ve upset you. But you’re right, I have a great many unanswered questions, and I had hoped you might know the answers to some of them.’

  ‘I tried to help Flora, but she was cruel to me,’ the older woman said, the husky voice turning to a shrill whine. She clutched at the front of her jacket as if distressed. ‘Please go now, there is nothing I can tell you that will help you. Just take what I saw in the cards with you.’

  Eva got out her purse to pay, but the women waved it away. ‘I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you.’

  Eva was both bewildered and embarrassed. There was nothing to do but leave. ‘I’m staying at Brae Bank, should you have a change of heart,’ she said. ‘My name is Eva Patterson, and I’m truly sorry I’ve upset you. That wasn’t my intention.’

  Eva went for a walk along the river, shaken by the woman’s reaction to finding out who she was. What on earth had Flora done to her that was so bad she couldn’t put it aside even after more than twenty years?

  The whole animal thing was so strange too; she’d never heard of anyone else using such cards.

  Was she like a deer? And was Phil her ox? Was Sophie the family member who needed help? Was the law thing something to do with Myles? And this tiger who was going to protect her, who was that? Patrick? But who was the eagle, her enemy? Was that Andrew, or someone she hadn’t met yet?

  She had always laughed at people who believed the things psychics and fortune-tellers had told them. So why was she rerunning the things Madame Dena had said through her mind, and giving them credence?

  It was late afternoon when Eva returned to the hotel. Her feet were throbbing because she’d walked so far, and she wrenched off her trainers and socks and ran a bath.

  She had gone over and over what Dena had said during the card reading. However much she wanted to believe the woman was a complete charlatan, she couldn’t. Fortune-tellers basically told people the stuff they wanted to hear – that they were going to be successful, that love was around the corner. They wouldn’t stay in business for long if they told everyone sad or frightening things.

  Was it possible that Dena was the real thing?

  Grace was wearing a very elegant black dress when she opened the door to Eva at seven that evening, her blonde hair was pinned up, and she had a chunky glittery bracelet on her wrist. ‘He’s been champing at the bit, waiting for you to arrive,’ she said. ‘I hope he’s not going to bore you rigid. I noticed he’s dug out some old photograph albums.’

  ‘I like looking at old photos,’ Eva said. ‘And I’ve been looking forward to seeing him.’

  Grace raised one eyebrow as if in disbelief. ‘You look lovely tonight. Shame you haven’t got someone young and handsome to take you out.’

  Eva laughed. She was wearing the turquoise dress she’d worn the night of her twenty-first birthday, and it looked much better now than it had then, because she was suntanned. ‘You look gorgeous too, and I’m quite happy to stay in with someone old but interesting,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t tell him you said that,’ Grace said. ‘Go on in. The starters are on the table and the main course is in the heated trolley. I’m off out to see a friend.’

  Gregor did look very pleased to see her. The table in front of a big window overlooking the garden was beautifully laid with a white cloth, blue and white polka-dot napkins, silver cutlery, crystal glasses, candles and an arrangement of blue and white flowers.

  ‘The table looks lovely,’ she said.

  ‘I think Grace wanted to make sure you felt welcome. She said I was churlish yesterday.’

  ‘You weren’t.’

  ‘I was when she said she hoped I would marry Flora. It wasn’t meant to come out the way it did.’

  ‘I think I’ve learned enough about Flora in the past few weeks to realize she was no saint,’ Eva said lightly. ‘You can tell me the truth about her, Gregor. That is what I want.’

  ‘What did Dena the crackpot tell you?’ he asked as he wheeled his chair over to a sideboard and poured them both a glass of wine. ‘Tell me about that first, it will get me in t
he mood.’

  Eva sat down on the sofa with her drink and launched into telling him about it.

  He was a very good listener, alert, asking the odd question here and there, and clearly taking it all in.

  ‘She’s spooked you?’ he asked, as she rounded it off with how Dena had told her to leave. ‘I’m not exactly surprised, she’s an odd fish. Many people are convinced she really does have “powers”.’

  Eva smiled at the way he made the inverted commas with two fingers. ‘Yes, she did spook me. What on earth did Flora do to her?’

  ‘She accused her very publicly of trying to take over her life, claimed that she was a latent lesbian and that she used her supposed “powers” to hide the fact she was a talentless blood-sucking leech.’

  Eva’s mouth fell open with shock. ‘She actually said all that?’

  ‘Yes, exactly that. It was at a Christmas party thrown by some friends of mine. At least twenty people witnessed it. I was appalled! We all were. Dena might be weird, but she didn’t warrant that kind of abuse. Dena ran out crying, and I told Flora to leave too. She said some horrible things to me and then stomped off. That was the main reason why I went away for Hogmanay. I realized that she had no feelings for me, and I wasn’t going to hang around and be humiliated in the way she’d humiliated Dena.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Eva said. ‘I can’t imagine her being like that. She always seemed more of a doormat than a firebrand.’

  ‘Maybe Dena’s spells worked then,’ he said.

  ‘Spells?’

  Gregor chuckled. ‘When I got back weeks later to find Flora had left Pitlochry, Dena was in the pub one night, pissed as a newt. She said she’d got even. She claimed she’d used her powers to make Flora suffer.’

  ‘After the way she was with me today, I can almost believe that of her.’ Eva smiled. ‘Have you seen that room of hers? I half expected the Forty Thieves to jump out from behind the draped walls.’

  ‘I have heard,’ he said, pulling a face. ‘But the tourists love it. She must be making a small fortune – though what she spends it on is a mystery. She lives in the room behind her office, rarely goes out and she doesn’t even have a car.’

  ‘Maybe she sponsors a coven of witches?’ Eva giggled.

  Gregor grinned. ‘Let’s have dinner now and talk about something less spooky. Grace is a fantastic cook, and I know she went to a lot of trouble because of you. It’s her special goulash. She only makes it for people she likes, so I don’t get it much.’

  Gregor was such good company. Eva forgot he was in a wheelchair and middle-aged, because he was witty and interesting – and he didn’t talk down to her either. He talked about climbing, and how as a young man he’d been in a search-and-rescue team on the mountains. He showed absolutely no bitterness about his accident, but admitted he’d been careless.

  ‘The only thing that makes me mad is people feeling sorry for me,’ he said. ‘Sometimes people talk to me as if I’m an imbecile because I’m in a wheelchair. I had a good run for my money, I climbed mountains all over the world, saw things most people only ever dream of. All that is still in my head, no one can take it away. Isn’t it better to be sitting in a wheelchair looking back on a life that was full of adventure, colour and mind-blowing sights, than to be able-bodied but looking back at a dull life, regretting that you never took a chance?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ she said.

  Both the starter of prawns marinated in garlic, chilli and coriander and the goulash were marvellous, and as they ate Eva confided her two ideas – one to open a guest house, and the other to become an interior designer. ‘The idea of having a guest house is only a few days old,’ she admitted. ‘I’m probably just being silly.’

  He asked her how she thought she could finance buying a guest house, and so she explained about the studio Flora had left to her. Now that the horror of her first night there was well in the past, she could tell the story and make it funny. He laughed with her, but then began to ask questions about why she went there in the middle of the night. Before she knew it, she was telling him the whole story – about Flora’s death, and Andrew telling her he wasn’t her father.

  ‘Oh my goodness, Eva!’ he exclaimed. ‘And to think I took you for a girl who had never had a moment of insecurity or unhappiness in your whole short life. How wrong could I be?’

  ‘Well, until I found Mum in the bath it hadn’t been such a bad one,’ she said. ‘You probably remember Mum was very fond of saying, “On every life a little rain must fall.” Although that seemed like an absolute torrent …’

  ‘It is not something any young girl should have to see,’ Gregor said. He looked very thoughtful, as if he was mulling over something in the past. ‘You know, Eva, I was always afraid that’s what Flora would do. When she first came here I half expected to get a call one day to say she’d been found in the river. It wasn’t that she was always gloomy or tearful, nothing tangible to point to anything wrong. But there was an aura about her, like a sadness that took her off somewhere else. I did my best to encourage her to talk about whatever it was. That was why I took her out for long hikes. We even camped out in the mountains sometimes. She was lively, chatty, fun to be with, but every now and then I’d see this expression on her face …’

  He paused. He looked as if he was searching for the right expression to describe it.

  ‘Have you been at a prize-giving when you thought you were going to get one?’ he asked Eva.

  ‘No, I was never in line for any prizes,’ she said.

  ‘Well, imagine it then. You are sitting there, expecting your name to be called. But someone else’s is read out. You have to adjust your face, to hide your disappointment and look glad for the person who has won. Flora often had that kind of look. Dena saw it more than I did. I think she might even have found out the reason for it, and that was why Flora attacked her verbally that Christmas.’

  ‘But you did love her?’

  ‘I certainly thought it was love then,’ he sighed. ‘When I was away from her I thought about her all the time. Yet when we were together I was frustrated by the distance she kept between us. I used to beg her to tell me what she wanted, but she’d just make a joke of it. Once she said she wanted a golden eagle’s tail feather.’

  That jolted Eva; she remembered hearing Flora say it to Andrew once. There had been many times when Eva had seen a similar pensive expression on her mother’s face to the one Gregor had described. Yet when asked if something was troubling her, she always laughed it off.

  ‘Was she painting while she was here?’ Eva asked.

  Gregor nodded. ‘Yes, and selling some of her work, both here and in Edinburgh. She told me once that a gallery in London wanted to put on an exhibition of her work, but she didn’t feel inclined to get back into what she called “the London scene”. I did wonder if that was because of someone from her past. She certainly didn’t seem to be motivated by making money from her art.’

  After they’d finished the meal Gregor wheeled his chair over to a coffee table and picked up a photograph album.

  ‘I dug this out this morning,’ he said. ‘There aren’t many pictures of Flora, she tore up all the ones she didn’t like. Until today I hadn’t looked at them for about eighteen years, and a lot of good memories came back.’

  He turned the pages till he came to one of Flora kneeling beside a stream filling a bowl with water. It was a black and white picture; Flora was wearing jeans and a thick Fair Isle sweater, and her hair was fixed up on the top of her head, the loose curls looking very pretty. She obviously didn’t know he was taking the picture, and her face was soft and relaxed.

  ‘She was lovely, wasn’t she?’ Eva said.

  ‘Yes, very much so. All my best memories of her are like this one. She loved camping, she didn’t do that prissy thing most women do about getting wet or mucky. She liked camp-fires, watching the sunset, hearing owls hoot at night. That day was the one she told me about her parents in Cornwall. I got the idea she felt g
uilty that she hadn’t made the effort to sort out the grievances she had with them before they died. She told me they left her their cottage and some money, and that with hindsight maybe she should’ve gone to live there and reconciled herself with the past.’

  ‘Maybe, as she had lost a baby then, she finally understood why her mother was so odd with her,’ Eva suggested. ‘When was this picture taken?’

  Gregor slid it out of the plastic folder and looked on the back. ‘The 29th of August, 1969. Near Glencoe. I remember we got badly bitten by midges. We went over to the coast the following day to get away from them.’

  ‘So she must have been pregnant then?’ Eva said.

  ‘I suppose she must’ve been, if you were born the following April. But she certainly didn’t say or do anything to suggest she was. You’d think someone who had miscarried would be careful with the next pregnancy, but she was climbing up rocks, running and jumping. We walked miles too.’

  Gregor turned the pages to a photo of Flora in the garden of the cottage. She was wearing just a man’s shirt, with her legs bare and her hair tumbling over her shoulders. She looked so young and beautiful. ‘I took that one right after our first night together. That was a few weeks after the trip to Glencoe.’

  Eva wanted to ask if he’d noticed she had a tummy. But he was looking at the picture as if reliving the night, and she couldn’t bring herself to.

  ‘Do you get on alright with Dena?’ she asked instead. ‘If you do, could you ring her and talk her round, about me? Try and get her to agree to meet me again?’

  He smiled. ‘I’ll give it a go. That is, if you’ll let me look at Flora’s diary. I might be able to see something in it that you’ve missed.’

  Eva agreed, and then looked through his album at the pictures of him. She couldn’t imagine why her mother hadn’t fallen head over heels in love with him, as he looked so tasty in his climbing gear.

  She told him a little about Phil and said he was coming up to join her on Saturday. ‘May I bring him to meet you? He’s not my boyfriend, just a friend, but I’m beginning to think it’s time I pushed things on to another level.’