Wyatt felt it was a good move, easier for Charlie to visit, as it involved only one bus, and a calmer, more pleasant environment for her mother to regain her health. It wasn’t a private home, just a council-run one, but Mr Wyatt had said it was every bit as good.
The last time Charlie had spoken to the surgeon who operated on her mother’s knees, he’d said they were mending well and if only she would do the exercises the physiotherapist had recommended, he saw no reason why she shouldn’t become mobile again. But so far Sylvia wasn’t making any effort, not with the exercises, or trying to accept what had happened to her. She seemed to be almost enjoying her misery.
Charlie’s spirits lifted when she got to the gate of Franklin House. It looked like a big private house with well-kept gardens, overlooking Kingsbridge School. It was painted white and the front door was a cheerful red, which she thought might have cheered her mother too.
A middle-aged nurse answered the door. ‘I’ve come to visit my mother, Mrs Sylvia Weish,’ Charlie said.
‘Come in, dear. I’m Staff Nurse Dodds,’ the woman said with a cheerful smile. She was a big woman with cheeks like russet apples. ‘I’ll take you along to the day room. Your mum’s along there with some of the other patients. Would you like to hang your wet coat up out here? It will be quite safe.’
As Charlie took off her coat and hung it on a row of pegs, she looked around her. The home was as pleasant inside as it looked from without. No grim institutional cream and green paint, but attractive wallpaper and carpet on the floor. It even smelled nice, of flowers, fresh air and polish.
‘This is a lovely place,’ Charlie said. ‘I do hope Mum’s appreciating it.’
Just the slight clouding on the nurse’s face told Charlie this wasn’t so. ‘Don’t tell me she’s being a pain here too?’ Charlie blurted out. It had become increasingly embarrassing to visit Sylvia in Dartmouth Hospital; she had alienated herself from just about every member of the staff with her constant complaints and rudeness.
Staff Nurse Edith Dodds had been working at Franklin House for over ten years. Yet in all that time she hadn’t met any patient who came close to being as difficult as Sylvia Weish. Today was only her fourth day at the home, yet she had already upset just about every member of staff, and most of the other patients. She complained about the food, that her bed was too hard, that the nurses weren’t giving her strong enough pain relief. Another patient in her room snored, she had a crick in her neck from a draughty window, she even accused a nurse of stealing one of her nighties, when in fact one of the voluntary visitors had kindly taken it home and washed it for her.
Edith was aware that Mr Weish was the Chinese businessman who’d mysteriously disappeared, and therefore common sense told her the daughter would have some Chinese characteristics. Yet in her mind she’d pictured the girl as a younger version of Sylvia, and equally difficult.
To be faced with this radiant and polite young girl was quite a shock. She didn’t think she’d ever seen anyone quite as lovely, with her jet-black shiny hair, soft dark almond eyes and golden skin. She was wearing a navy and white mini-dress, and her long slender legs were tanned a dark brown. Edith could imagine what prompted Mr Weish to run away from his wife – she would try the patience of a saint – but she couldn’t imagine any father wanting to leave a daughter like this one.
‘I’m afraid she’s not settling down too well,’ Edith said with some reluctance. She didn’t want to burden such a young girl with more worries. ‘But I’m sure you’ll cheer her up.’
Charlie half smiled. ‘I’ve never managed to do that yet on a visit,’ she admitted, ‘but I can but try.’
Staff Nurse Dodds led Charlie down a wide corridor to a large room at the end of the building. It was almost like being in the garden, for there were large windows on all three sides of the room and the carpet was grass-green. Unlike in the hospital, most of the eighteen or so people in the room were under sixty, three or four probably only in their twenties, about a third male, the rest female. Some were recuperating from operations and illnesses and sat in armchairs and wore everyday clothes; a couple of them had a leg in plaster and sat with it out in front of them on a stool. Then there were three or four, including Sylvia, who were in nightclothes and sitting in wheelchairs. Everyone except Sylvia smiled at Charlie as she walked in. Sylvia pointedly turned her head away.
Since Charlie had taken her mother to task about her appearance in hospital, Sylvia had taken note. She allowed the nurses to wash her hair, she did her nails and her makeup every day. Yet she wasn’t the glamorous woman she had been. Her nightdresses might be exquisite dainty ones from an exclusive lingerie shop, her slippers rose velvet and her dressing-gown silk, but the misery inside her showed in her face. Daily, the lines around her mouth and eyes were getting deeper, there was a grey tinge to her skin that no amount of expensive cosmetics could conceal.
Charlie saw immediately that this visit was going to be potentially embarrassing. She turned to Staff Nurse Dodds and quietly asked if there was somewhere private she could talk to her mother.
‘By all means,’ the nurse said, and grabbing the handles of the wheelchair, turned Sylvia around and pushed her towards the door. The room she took them to was only next door; it was tiny, with just a couple of chairs and a small table.
‘Well, Mum,’ Charlie said as soon as the nurse had gone out, ‘this is better, isn’t it? I don’t suppose you wanted to talk to me in front of all those people.’
‘You took your time getting here, didn’t you?’ Sylvia whined. ‘But I suppose your mother is a hindrance now.’
‘Don’t start on that tack,’ Charlie said impatiently. Sylvia said the same thing every visit, like a stuck record. ‘I’m working as you well know. I can’t come and see you every five minutes. Now, how are you feeling?’
‘Like death,’ she said gloomily, and fumbled in the pocket of her dressing-gown for her cigarettes. ‘I hope you brought me some more of these, I’ve nearly run out.’
Charlie opened her bag and brought out three packets and a copy of Woman’s Own. She had given up trying to sweeten her mother with little treats. Sylvia only ever wanted cigarettes and magazines.
Sylvia didn’t thank her, not even with a smile. Instead she looked right into Charlie’s eyes and made a sort of growling noise. ‘You look just like Jin,’ she said venomously. ‘I suppose you know the bankruptcy hearing’s next month? I’ll be finished then. That idiot Wyatt is as crooked as your father. I bet he’ll make a fortune out of it!’
‘Please don’t say nasty things about Mr Wyatt, Mum, he’s the only person out there who is trying to help us,’ Charlie pleaded with her.
‘He’s a pompous twat. He would drop our case like a hot brick if he could, but he’s stuck with it.’
Charlie felt there was a certain amount of truth in that – he often cut her short when she telephoned him and he certainly wasn’t as kind as she had thought at first. ‘Well, even if he is pompous, he can’t make a fortune out of it, there is no fortune to be had,’ she said.
‘I don’t see why they should take my house. It isn’t fair. I’m not responsible for what that bastard’s done,’ Sylvia bleated. ‘Isn’t it bad enough that Jin took my jewellery as well as all the money?’
Charlie was stumped for a moment. Surprisingly, her mother hadn’t mentioned it once in all these weeks, clearly she was totally convinced in her own mind it was gone. Charlie hated Sylvia thinking Jin would stoop that low, but to tell her the truth might be dangerous. She could just imagine her mother insisting she brought it to her and indeed wearing some of it, if only to show off. Perhaps it would be best just to ignore the last question?
‘But the house belongs to the mortgage company,’ she said with all the weariness she felt. She had accepted this now. She didn’t like it, it made her angry just to think about it. But as Ivor had said on several occasions, ‘Acceptance is the first step towards recovery.’
‘Even if they let you keep it, you cou
ldn’t afford to run it anyway,’ Charlie went on. ‘They’ll let you keep the furniture and stuff. Mr Wyatt said he would help us to find somewhere else to live. We can make that nice wherever it is.’
‘What rot you talk,’ Sylvia snapped back, her blue eyes as cold as a January sea. ‘Do you know what they’ll give me? A poky council place surrounded by all sorts of riffraff. What will I do all day in a place like that?’
‘The same as you did at “Windways”. You’ll sit in a chair chain-smoking and reading magazines.’
‘How can you say things like that to me?’ Sylvia seemed to puff up in her chair, her eyes flashed dangerously. ‘I’ve given you everything. You were treated like a princess. If it wasn’t for you I’d never have been buried in the country in the first place.’
‘So you didn’t want to move to Dartmouth? Is that what you’re saying?’ Charlie thought that now her mother was good and angry she might let slip a few old secrets. ‘You wanted to stay in London? Didn’t you work in one of Dad’s clubs?’
‘Work in them! Without me behind him he wouldn’t have even thought of owning one!’ she spat out. ‘I was the one who knew everything.’
‘So why did you tell the police you knew nothing about them?’ Charlie said indignantly. She was tired of her mother making things up to suit herself. Just a week ago, for no particular reason, she’d suddenly admitted Jin had never been a drug dealer. Charlie didn’t know what to believe sometimes.
‘Of course I knew about them. But I wasn’t going to tell them, was I?’
‘I suppose you’ll be telling me next that Dad forced you to strip in those clubs?’
Charlie said that only as a ruse to aggravate Sylvia enough for her to respond. Yet it didn’t have the desired effect, she just looked confused and wary, and suddenly clammed up.
‘Why don’t you tell me about those years?’ Charlie pleaded. ‘It might help me to understand you and Dad, and why everything went wrong.’
To her surprise her mother slumped back in her chair, her lips quivering. She looked as if all the fight had gone out of her.
‘Mum, if you and I are going to have any sort of future we’ll have to face up to things,’ Charlie said in a low voice, moving closer to her and taking her hands in hers. ‘We’re losing our lovely home, we’ve lost Dad. You are sitting there in that chair and unless you make a real effort, you’ll remain in it. All we’ve got left is one another. If I’m going to care for you, the least you can do in return is tell me the truth about your past.’
There was a long silence. Sylvia snatched her hands away from Charlie’s and lit up yet another cigarette.
‘You think you’re so bloody clever,’ she said eventually, her tone crackling with spite. ‘But you would, wouldn’t you? Private schools, the best clothes and toys, adored by everyone just because you look like a little Chinese doll. You might be more intelligent than I ever was, Charlie, but there’s one fatal flaw in you.’
‘What’s that?’ Charlie had found so many flaws in her character in the past few weeks she wondered which of them her mother was going to pick on.
‘You haven’t a clue what poverty is like. Or the lengths people will go to to get out of it.’
Charlie’s eyebrows arched in surprise. She believed she did know, after all she had to watch every penny she spent now. She couldn’t afford to smoke, or even buy a new lipstick.
‘I do,’ she said indignantly. ‘I spent the last of my wages on those cigarettes for you. All I’ve got is my bus fare home.’
Sylvia snorted, but there was a touch of amusement in it. ‘I’m talking about real poverty,’ she said. ‘The kind when your stomach aches constantly with hunger, when there’s holes in your shoes, and the only dress you have is the one you stand up in. You’ve never experienced that and I doubt you ever will.’
‘No, but –’
Sylvia cut her short. ‘I spent my childhood in an orphanage,’ she said. ‘My mother dumped me there in 1933. I was only four, she sat me down on the doorstep, pinned a label to my dress with my name and age on it, and told me to wait there. She skipped off and I never saw her again.’
Charlie gasped with horror. This was a real revelation and one she’d never imagined. ‘Oh, Mum! Why didn’t you ever tell me this before?’
‘Because I’ve spent most of my life trying to forget it,’ Sylvia said waspishly. ‘Anyway, that isn’t the point. That orphanage was a terrible place. We got beaten, half starved, and we knew there was nothing better in store for us when we left either. I was fourteen when I got chucked out, it was 1944, the war was still going on and I got sent as a maid to a house in Kensington. I had to get up at five to light fires, I had to clean the entire four-storey house alone, help the cook, clean shoes and do the washing. But I was grateful because I thought I was going up in the world!’
‘That’s terrible, Mum.’ Charlie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘But were the people kind to you?’
‘Well, they didn’t beat me, and I got fed, never mind that I finally fell into my bed at after twelve every night and lived in terror of the doodlebugs and V2s. But like I said, when you’ve known real hunger you’ll do anything for food. Even put up with a pervert.’
Charlie blanched. She wanted to know about her mother, but she had a feeling she’d just opened Pandora’s Box. ‘A pervert, Mum? Do you mean the man you worked for?’
‘Yes. He was a barrister, one of the top ones in London. I was a poor little fool, as hungry for affection as I was for food, and he took advantage of it. It started off with him sitting me on his lap and fondling me when his wife was out. I suppose I knew it was wrong, yet I let him, because in my stupidity I thought he must love me.
‘The war ended and I was still there, he had his hands up my dress every five minutes by then, and then one day when his wife had gone off to the country he raped me.’
‘No, oh Mum,’ Charlie gasped.
Sylvia shrugged, her face was expressionless. ‘It wasn’t so bad, at least not after the first time, but he told me if I kept quiet about it, he would see me all right. I believed him too, God I was so trusting. I thought it meant a little house somewhere, money and nice clothes. Until I found I was pregnant.’
Charlie’s eyes filled with tears. She reached out for her mother’s hand and squeezed it, not knowing what to say.
‘Do you know what that bastard said when I told him? He said I had to tell his wife it was by a boy I’d met in a dance-hall on my night off. He said if I did that he’d make private arrangements for me. Like a fool I did exactly that, trusting him to keep his end of the bargain. But she threw me out immediately, saying I was a dirty little slut. She wouldn’t even give me a reference. As for him, well, I never saw him again.’
Charlie’s tears were cascading down her face now. ‘What happened to the baby?’ she cried.
‘I lost it at seven months or so,’ Sylvia said in a cold voice. ‘I was too dumb even to know exactly how far gone I was, and I’d been sleeping rough. A group of sailors caught me one night and had me one after the other. I started bleeding then, someone got me to a hospital, and the baby was born but it was dead already.’
Charlie’s stomach lurched at such further horror. She knew without any doubt that this was the truth. ‘How old were you, Mum?’ she whispered.
‘Seventeen. Not much older than you. When I got better I made up my mind I was going to use men in future, not the other way around.’
Everything unusual Charlie had ever noted about. her mother came sharply into focus. The cold, calculating way she appraised men, the flirtatious way she always approached them if they were rich, influential or she wanted something from them. The way she maintained a glamorous appearance whatever else was going on around her. Now Charlie understood the root cause.
She knew her parents had married in 1952, she had looked at the photographs so many times as a child. What happened in the five years before ’47 and then? Something told her it was better not to ask, but she had to.
&nb
sp; ‘I got a job in a café in Soho for a while. But I made so little money I knew I’d have to find something else. I watched the prostitutes and thought about that, but I couldn’t stomach it. Then I got asked to strip in a club. So I did.’
Such unabashed honesty floored Charlie. Her mouth fell open in shock.
‘Why not?’ Sylvia said in defiance. ‘I had a good body, lovely legs and I was pretty. I enjoyed it too. Somehow every night I was getting back at that rotten bastard who’d made me pregnant. Those sad, pathetic men who were cheating on their wives by looking at other women’s bodies were paying. They could watch, ogle me, but they couldn’t touch me. I liked it. I had power over them.’
Put like that, Charlie could understand.
‘So when did you meet Dad? Did he come to the club?’ Oddly enough, although she could accept her mother’s reasons for being a stripper, she found it a lot harder to cope with the idea of her father hanging around in such places.
‘No. He was never like those men. I met him out in the street in January of 1949, he asked me the way to China Town in Soho. He’d only just arrived in England.’
‘Did he know what you did for a living?’
‘Not at first. I told him I was a secretary. But as time went on and I fell in love with him I admitted everything.’
‘So you did love him then?’ Charlie’s heart leapt absurdly at this. She’d been afraid she was going to hear he was just another man her mother used.
‘Oh yes. Jin was the only man I ever loved. I would have died for him.’
‘So why are you so nasty about him now, then?’ Charlie asked, but the moment the words came out she knew she’d said the wrong thing.
It was as though a steel shutter had come down between them.
Sylvia had been relaxed, she hadn’t lit another cigarette. Her voice had softened as if she was relieved to talk. But that was gone now. The tension was back in her face, her eyes were cold again.