Beth wouldn’t have thought anything of the childish remark but for Steven’s obvious embarrassment. He had blushed scarlet and his retort to Sophie, ‘What a ridiculous thing to say’, suggested the child was right. But Beth made no comment and told them she’d made chocolate Angel Delight for their pudding, because when she was little that had been her favourite.
‘I got you a video to watch too, while Daddy and I talk,’ she said as she put sundae glasses with the chocolate pudding in front of them. She’d squirted some cream on the top in a spiral and both girls grinned delightedly. ‘You’ve probably seen it already, it’s Beauty and the Beast.’
‘They’ve only seen it once at the pictures,’ Steven said. ‘They loved it too, they’ve been on at me to get the video.’
Steven was touched by the way Beth was with his girls, cool as she always was, but interested and surprisingly caring. It was amazing she’d thought to get a video for them, and the pudding served in such posh glasses proved she really hadn’t forgotten what it was like to be a small girl.
‘Why haven’t you got a husband?’ Sophie asked as she spooned out the last of her pudding.
Steven wanted to snap at her again, but Beth just laughed.
‘I kept looking for a prince,’ she said. ‘And none came along.’
‘I wouldn’t care about getting married if I could live somewhere nice like this,’ Polly said. ‘I’d have animals instead of children.’
‘That sounds quite a good idea,’ Beth agreed laughingly. ‘I’d like a dog, but it’s not fair to have one in a flat, especially when I’m out at work all day.’
‘So you like dogs?’ Steven said. ‘I would have imagined you with cats.’
Beth shook her head and winced. ‘No, they’re too superior for me. If I got a pet it would have to reward me with lots of slavering love.’
‘What’s slavering?’ Polly asked, scraping the last of the chocolate pudding from the glass.
‘Like this!’ Beth said, and leaned over towards her, licking her cheek and panting.
Polly giggled in delight. ‘Down, doggie, down,’ she said.
‘Can we watch Beauty and the Beast now?’ Sophie asked. ‘Or should we help you wash up?’
Beth smiled. ‘What a good girl,’ she said, patting Sophie’s hair. ‘No, you watch the video and Daddy and I will stay here and talk. Just call out if you need us.’
Steven put the video on for the girls and felt relieved to see them curl up on the settee together to watch it. As he went back into the kitchen Beth was putting some cheese and biscuits on the table. She poured him another glass of wine.
‘They’re lovely girls, a credit to you and Anna,’ she said. ‘Now, come on, tell me about Susan.’
As Steven explained everything which had passed between them, and his own thoughts on Susan, time and again he was distracted by the incongruity of fate. He’d spent the best part of a year trying to find out more about this woman, and suddenly here he was in her flat, his children in the next room, and he was just so comfortable. It was so long since he’d been waited on, his glass filled, a plate of cheese placed before him, the dirty dishes disappearing like magic into a dishwasher, that it brought it home to him even more poignantly just how bad his home life had become.
‘I can hardly credit she spent eighteen years looking after her mother.’ He sighed. ‘Talk about being buried alive! But time ran out all too quickly. Still, at least she wasn’t hesitant at talking, I think next time I’ll be able to get her to open up about Annabel’s father.’
‘Was she against the idea of me going to see her too?’ Beth asked.
‘No, she was touched you wanted to,’ Steven replied. ‘Tell me, did she look a bit like Judith Durham as a young girl?’
Beth thought for a moment. ‘Yes, she did, come to think of it. Not so big, straight shiny hair, a fringe, lovely skin, clear eyes. A pretty face. Age and trouble haven’t been too kind on her looks.’
‘What were you like then?’ he asked.
‘A scrawny beanpole with a chalk-white face,’ she said, but her laugh had a trace of sadness in it.
‘And was your life at university as Susan imagines, wild parties every night?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I studied by day, waited on tables by night. I was always intending to write to Susan again, but like her I didn’t get time, and I suppose I too thought I had nothing to say that would interest her. Then it got to the stage where I thought it was just too late to try and pick up the pieces.’
Steven picked up that she didn’t like him turning things around to ask her questions. ‘I’m sorry, if you think I’m prying,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I want to get the picture of you two together. You see, I don’t think she’s had another friend since, so how she related to you is all-important.’
‘We were both loners,’ Beth said thoughtfully. ‘Of course, you don’t know that at ten, you think you haven’t got many friends because you’re plain or dumb or something. You don’t find out what you really are till much later. I think our family circumstances were an influence. Susan couldn’t take friends home because of her grandmother, with me it was my father.’
‘What about your father?’
Beth shrugged. ‘A man who liked to think he was Lord of the Manor, in reality he was living in the past, the house crumbling around him because he was so out of touch with reality.’
Steven raised an eyebrow.
‘Don’t ask any more,’ she said wearily. ‘My father is someone I prefer not to think about.’
‘But he’s still alive?’
‘Yes. My brother put him in a nursing home a couple of years back after my mother died. I never see him, if that’s going to be the next question.’
Steven thought he’d better give up on that tack. ‘I think Susan’s ready to change her plea,’ he said. ‘If we can prove that for the last four years she went through hell, I think we’ve got every chance of getting her off with a light sentence.’
‘There was more from the receptionist’s husband in the local paper this evening,’ Beth said suddenly. ‘Pictures of him and his children at home. It looks like he’s on a crusade to get Susan hung, drawn and quartered. Understandable, of course, but there’s something about his tone which doesn’t ring true.’
‘Can I see it?’
‘Look at it in the office tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Polly and Sophie will want to know about it. I don’t think little girls should know such things.’
‘There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye,’ Steven said. ‘I didn’t expect you to be in tune with children, or to be so domestic’ He glanced around the kitchen, noting not only the way everything sparkled, but odd homely touches – a hand-knitted tea cosy like a thatched cottage and a gaily coloured wooden parrot on a perch by the window. ‘Were you ever married?’
‘No, Steven,’ she said and her face tightened a little. ‘I haven’t been. I never met anyone I liked enough to settle down with. But now and again, when I meet nice kids like yours, I think I’d like to have been a mother.’
Steven sensed that was as far as she was prepared to go. He looked at his watch and saw it was nearly half past nine. ‘I must take the girls home now,’ he said. ‘They are usually in bed by eight.’
Beth got up and looked into the sitting room, smiling when she saw the video had actually finished and the girls were asleep. She beckoned for Steven to come and look. Polly was sitting up, her head lolling over to one side, and her younger sister had her head on her lap, sucking her thumb.
Steven sighed. ‘They won’t like being disturbed,’ he said.
‘I’ll carry Sophie down to your car, you carry Polly,’ she said. ‘Maybe they won’t wake up.’
The girls woke as the cold air outside hit them, but said nothing more than a sleepy farewell to Beth. As Steven drove off he looked in his driving mirror and saw Beth still standing there on the pavement beneath a street light. He wondered what she was thinking.
Chapter nine
br /> Susan had a black eye when Steven visited her at the prison on Friday.
‘Good God!’ he exclaimed in horror. ‘Who did that to you?’
She could barely open the eye to look at him, but even so she half smiled. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks. I can live with it.’
Steven wondered how a woman who had led such a sheltered life could be so resigned about being hurt by another woman.
‘I won’t suggest you make a formal complaint,’ he said, knowing that would make things worse for her. ‘Just tell me, between ourselves, why she did it.’
‘Because of what I did of course,’ Susan said, looking at him as if his question was stupid. ‘She’d seen the pictures of Roland Parks and his children in the paper and decided I needed a good hiding.’
Steven wished he’d had the foresight to ask the prison governor to remove anything about Susan and her crime from newspapers before they were brought on to the wing. That wouldn’t stop information about her getting through of course, it could still be passed on during visits, but just the time that took, and getting the news second or third hand, usually had a diluting effect. He was a little puzzled though, for it was unusual for prisoners to react with aggression to a crime like Susan’s. Violence was usually only meted out to child abusers.
‘Have you thought about what I asked you last time?’ he said, as time was too short to (discuss bullying any further.
She nodded.
‘Okay then,’ Steven said. ‘Suppose we start with Annabel’s birth? You had her at St Michael’s, I understand. Was her father there at the birth?’
Susan blushed and looked down at her hands. She didn’t want to talk about her love affair with Liam. She guessed Mr Smythe would want to know if he was her first lover, where and how she met him, details she had never revealed to anyone.
‘I split up with her father before I came to Bristol,’ she said hurriedly. ‘If you really need to know about him, I’d rather tell Beth.’
‘That’s fine,’ Steven replied, he certainly didn’t want her clamming up with embarrassment now. ‘Just start with Annabel’s birth then. Was it a difficult one?’
‘No, it was very quick. I went into labour during the night and by nine in the morning I’d called the ambulance. She was born at two in the afternoon without any stitches or anything afterwards.’
‘Well done,’ he said admiringly. ‘My wife had dozens when the oldest was born and it took a day and a half. How long did you stay in?’
‘Four days,’ she said. ‘But it was too noisy there, I was glad to get home with her.’
‘Any help at home?’ he asked.
‘I didn’t need any,’ she said with a touch of indignation. ‘New babies sleep all the time.’
‘Mine didn’t,’ he said, and she laughed.
‘Well, maybe I was lucky, Annabel was just so easy from the start,’ she said, a dreamy expression coming into her eyes. ‘It was the loveliest time, just her and me. I slept when she did, just sat about cuddling her when she was awake. I wanted to hang on to every moment of it.’
‘You loved being a mum then?’
‘Oh yes.’ She sighed. ‘It was just the best thing ever, the first time I took her out in her pram I was so proud. People used to stop and speak to me in the road, to look at her, you know. I felt that at last I was a real person, sort of finished and complete.’
‘But you must have been lonely on your own with her?’
She frowned. ‘No, not at all. People spoke to me in the street, I’d pop in and have a coffee with some of the older people who were home during the day. Besides, there’s so much to do with a small child, the days went past too quickly for me sometimes. When Annabel was in bed I had sewing and knitting to do. I did feel very lonely at home with my mother, but never with Annabel.’
‘I used to like taking my girls to the park when they were very small,’ Steven confided. ‘Putting them on the swings and stuff. Where did you take Annabel?’
‘Brandon Hill mostly,’ she said. ‘I loved it there in summer, it’s so high you can see all over Bristol. When Annabel got to the toddling stage she liked to look in the pond and see the waterfall running down through the rocks.’
‘My girls liked that too,’ Steven said. ‘They used to bully me to take them up there to feed the squirrels.’
‘The squirrels were Annabel’s favourite,’ Susan said. Her voice began to quaver and her eyes filled with tears. ‘We used to take nuts for them, she had names for every one of them.’
She could see Brandon Hill as clearly as if she were standing there looking at it, the last autumn before Annabel died. The squirrels were mainly on the part closest to Berkeley Square where Beth and Steven’s office was. The grassy banks rose steeply there, up to Cabot Tower on the top. In the summer the grass was shaded by the big trees but in November it was hidden under a carpet of fallen leaves.
In her mind she saw Annabel running excitedly ahead of her, in her red duffle coat and navy-blue woolly tights, her legs still plump with baby fat.
‘Come on, Mummy, run!’ She could hear her high little voice shouting out and see her turn, holding out her small hands as if she imagined she could pull her mother up the steep bank.
‘I can’t run as fast as you,’ Susan would say breathlessly. ‘The squirrels will wait till I get there.’
Annabel’s eyes were dark like Liam’s, melting pools of chocolate with long, thick lashes. Her hair curled like his too, always tangled, however much Susan brushed it. One of the neighbours in Ambra Vale called her Smilabel, because she was always smiling. Susan couldn’t remember her ever being grumpy, not even when she first woke.
‘She gave them all girls’ names,’ Susan said, aware that while thinking about her daughter she must have been silent for some time. ‘There was Wendy, Lucy, Mary and Linda, I remember, I used to say that some of them had to be boys, but she wouldn’t have it. She said they were too pretty to be boys.’ She paused and looked at Steven. ‘I suppose that was because there weren’t any men in our life.’
Steven thought perhaps she felt a little guilty about that. ‘My girls give all animals girls’ names too,’ he said. ‘They’ve got a rabbit called Florence which is really a boy.’
There was a pause. Steven didn’t know what to say next.
‘Can you imagine how you’d feel if one of your girls was taken from you?’ Susan asked him, her eyes brimming over.
Steven shook his head.
‘You try to hold on to every single memory,’ she said softly. ‘The scent of her hair, the smoothness of her skin. I lie awake at night and try to hear her singing nursery rhymes. Sometimes I’d be in a shop and a child would call its mother, and I’d jump, thinking it was her. Yet you do know your own child’s voice, no other child’s is quite the same.’
‘Where did you go to after she died?’ Steven asked. He didn’t feel able to ask her about her death, not now while she was already upset.
‘To Wales,’ she said, her voice suddenly taking on a harsher tone. Steven looked at her expectantly, but she seemed reluctant to go on. ‘I joined a sort of commune,’ she said eventually.
‘A commune?’ Steven exclaimed. That was the last thing he’d expected. ‘I thought they all disappeared in the early Seventies?’
‘It wasn’t like those,’ she said sharply. ‘This one was a kind of religious group.’
‘How did you come to join it?’
‘I was out walking in Leigh Woods, about three months after Annabel died. A couple came along and they asked me what was wrong because I was crying. They were so kind, they walked home with me and suggested I went to their church. They said it would help me.’
Steven nodded. ‘Go on,’ he said as she seemed to be faltering.
‘I was so desperate, I’d have tried anything,’ she said, and she tried to smile as if she thought it was all a bit foolish now. ‘It wasn’t the kind of church I was used to, no proper vicar, an altar or organ. Just a hall and a piano, with lots of singing a
nd people getting up and saying how finding Jesus had made them whole again. I can’t really explain why, but I did feel better for being there.’
Steven knew the kind of group, life’s rejects, the poor, the cranky, the socially inadequate, and troubled ones like Susan, all gathering together for mutual consolation. He had known clients who had joined such groups for a while, and remarkably, it sometimes made them turn away from crime.
‘Was it someone in the group that suggested you moved into the commune?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘A man called Reuben Moreland. A psychic healer.’
Steven raised an eyebrow questioningly. Susan blushed. ‘He said he could make me well again. Each time I talked to him I felt stronger, so I believed in him. Anyway, he took me over to look at this place he had in Wales and I liked it. They grew their own vegetables, had a few chickens, and they did craft work which was sold in gift shops to help keep the place going. I thought it was just what I needed.’
There was a defensive note in her voice which suggested to Steven that things had turned sour later, but she wanted him to understand why she was attracted to the place initially.
‘It was so lovely and peaceful,’ she went on. ‘It was late summer then and the scenery so beautiful. I had nothing and no one back in Bristol. I was good at gardening. I could sew, knit, cook and make jam. Reuben showed me these little plaster cottages they made and painted by hand, I thought I’d like to do that. He said I would be an asset to the commune.’
‘Did you have any reservations?’
She sighed. ‘Only about giving up everything I owned. That did seem a bit like burning all my bridges.’
‘Why were you expected to do that?’ Steven asked, alarm bells ringing in his head.
‘Reuben said money and possessions were what held us back from being really free. One of the conditions of joining the commune was that you had to give everything to it. I didn’t have much money, only about a hundred pounds in savings, but I had good pieces of furniture from my parents’ home, bits of jewellery that were my mother’s. I didn’t like the idea of them all being sold. They meant a lot to me.’