Forgive Me (28 page)

After she’d unpacked her clothes and
put them away, she walked down into the town to explore.

The shops had only just closed and the cafes
and restaurants were quiet, as people hadn’t yet come out for an evening meal. She
saw a shop selling artist’s materials which looked as if it had been in the same
hands for several decades, and made a mental note to call in there the next day. Most of
the shops were the souvenir kind selling china Highland cows, tartan scarves and the
like. But there were a couple of art galleries, with good displays of hand-thrown
pottery, locally made jewellery and paintings. Eva realized that back in 1969 Pitlochry
had probably been far less sophisticated, and yet she was getting a strong sense of what
had attracted Flora to stay here.

Back in her room that evening, after fish
and chips in a cafe, Eva got out Flora’s diaries and found the one which she
thought was written while her mother was up here. It was infuriating that the entries
weren’t dated, because it was impossible to know whether two entries were on
consecutive days, or weeks apart.

‘Such a long, weary drive,’ she
read. ‘Stopped in M too tired to go any further.’

Was ‘M’ Manchester?

‘Too grim to stay another night. Worse
bed I’ve ever slept in.’ That sounded as if she was still in
‘M’, and the next entry appeared to be on the same day. ‘Band playing,
I love bagpipes, and the sun is shining. Scenery inspiring, if the B&B wasn’t
so awful I could stay here for days.’

Eva doubted she’d encountered a pipe
band in Manchester, and the views there would not have been inspiring, so she had to be
in Scotland. She made a mental note to buy a more detailed map of Scotland in the
morning.

‘Scotland is bigger than I
imagined,’ Flora had written next. ‘Couldn’t drive any further so
stopped in P.’

That could be Perth, but Eva felt it was
more likely to be Pitlochry, because she didn’t mention any further driving after
that, only that another bed and breakfast had no hot water.

‘Rent for cottage only four pounds a
week,’ was the next entry. ‘A bit primitive, but it’s got good vibes.
I need that to get me out of these black moods.’

She referred obliquely to depression in
several entries after that. The effort required to wash her hair, staying in bed all
day, and avoiding someone she called ‘D’ who she said ‘analysed’
her. Eva got the idea she was wrestling with depression, wanting to hide away from
people, yet knew this wasn’t helping her mental state. As Patrick had said,
sometimes her entries appeared to be just random thoughts: ‘I could just walk into
the river at night and let the water embrace me,’ was one that sounded very much
like the temptation of suicide. But then the very next entry was: ‘Watched
dragonflies hovering over the water, so beautiful I found myself smiling
again.’

She must have warmed to ‘D’, as
she mentioned him or her quite often, usually to say he or she had called, they’d
supper, gone to the pub or visited nearby villages together. There was also a
‘G’. The latter was clearly someone she did like. Eva thought it was a he,
as she mentioned him quite a lot and she went camping, hiking and had dinner with him.
In one entry she called ‘G’ a ‘soulmate’.

Could this ‘G’ be Eva’s
father?

If he was, Flora wasn’t inclined to
write about any kind of romantic interludes. She wrote about painting views of the
river, taking the garden in hand and long walks in the woods. There was not so much as a
hint of a love affair, let alone pregnancy.

Eva’s last thoughts as she drifted off
to sleep were that if she could find the cottage Flora had stayed in, maybe the present
owner would be able to shed more light on her stay here.

She found the cottage the next morning. It
was on the far side of the river Tummel, a short distance from the dam for the
hydroelectric plant. Even if she hadn’t taken the little picture of the cottage
painted by Flora with her, she would have recognized it by the old cast-iron latticework
forming an arch over the front door.

In the picture the cottage looked charmingly
dilapidated, with straggling roses over the arch, the front door in need of a coat of
paint, and a weed-strewn path leading from a sagging gate. But it wasn’t like that
now; it was painted a soft pale pink, the door glossy white, as was the latticework
arch. Although it was late in the summer, there was purple clematis scrabbling through
the carefully trained rose which still had many pink blooms. New windows, a white picket
fence and proliferations of hanging baskets and tubs in the tiny front garden gave the
cottage a ‘take your snapshots in front of me’ look.

Taking a deep breath, Eva lifted the brass
lion’s-head knocker and rapped on the door.

A pleasant-faced woman who appeared to be in
her early forties, wearing an apron that said ‘Kiss the Cook’, opened the
door.

‘I’m sorry to disturb
you,’ Eva said, ‘but my mother painted this cottage some twenty-two years
ago – I think when she was renting it. She died recently, and I’m trying to find
out more about her time in Scotland.’

She showed the painting to the woman.

‘Well I never,’ she said, taking
it in her hands and smiling.
‘What a lovely picture. I remember
it like that from when I was a girl. How sad you’ve lost your mother, and you so
young.’

The woman had the softest Scottish accent, a
smear of flour on her face and more on her apron – all of which suggested she would be
very kindly.

‘Yes, it was sad.’ Eva had no
compunction in getting the woman’s sympathy. ‘Was the cottage owned by your
family then?’

‘No, my dear,’ she said.
‘But come on in, you don’t want to stand out on the doorstep.’

The woman introduced herself as Janet Mayhew
and proceeded to make tea, urging Eva to sit down at the kitchen table.

‘I’ve been baking.’ Janet
waved her hand at a cooling tray of buns. ‘I’ve just put some shortbread and
some flapjacks in the oven. Now what was it you wanted to know?’

The inside of the cottage was as attractive
as its outside, with lots of pretty china on a dresser, potted plants on the window
sill, and a fat ginger cat lying on the mat by the open back door. But the pine kitchen
units looked new, so Eva knew it wouldn’t have been the same when Flora lived
here.

Eva gave Janet an edited version of her
mother’s death, finding the diaries and the picture of the cottage. ‘Mum
didn’t talk about her past,’ she explained. ‘She never even told me
she’d been a successful artist, let alone that she lived in Scotland for a while.
I want to try to discover why she was here, who with, and just a bit more about her. So
do you know who owned the cottage then?’

‘Aye, it was the Hamiltons. Old Will
Hamilton bought up a few wee cottages in the town after the war. I know this one was
rented out to men while they worked on building the dam, but that was finished in the
1950s. When I was a wee
schoolgirl there was a crazy old lady lived
here. Old Will died sometime around 1967, I think, and his son Gregor took over
management of everything.’

‘So Gregor Hamilton would have rented
this to Mum?’ Eva asked, her mind turning to the letter G in the diaries.

‘Aye, he would that. My husband bought
the cottage from him in 1975.’

‘Do you suppose I could meet
him?’

‘I’m sure he’d like that.
He’s been in a wheelchair since a climbing accident a few years back. Such a
shame, he was always so active. My husband used to climb with him and he goes up to see
him at least once a week. Gregor puts a brave face on it, but it can’t be pleasant
being stuck in a chair all day.’

Eva had a cup of tea with Janet, and tried
one of her buns, and they chatted about general things for some time. Eva was very
tempted to tell the older woman the whole story, because she was so nice. But she
controlled the urge; she didn’t want Gregor to get wind of anything that might
make him wary of talking to her.

‘So how old is Gregor?’ she
asked. ‘It must be hard for his family if he’s in a wheelchair.’

‘He’s around fifty, a bit
younger than my hubby. He never married. He’s only got his younger sister, Grace,
and her family now. They share the big house with him, though Gregor has converted the
downstairs rooms for himself.’

Eva liked the way Janet pronounced house
‘hoose’. It reminded her of a book she had when she was small that contained
a poem about a moose who lived in a ‘hoose’. Flora used to put on a Scottish
accent when she read it to her. Perhaps she even thought about Pitlochry as she read
it.

‘I should go now,’ Eva said as
Janet got her shortbread and flapjacks out of the oven. ‘Could you let me have
Gregor’s address and phone number?’

‘I will, but why don’t you go up
to the house just now?’ Janet said. ‘He gets lonely, and a nice wee girl
like you stopping by will make his day.’

Janet gave her the address and drew a little
map. It was only two streets from the hotel, further up the hill.

As it was just on one, Eva didn’t go
straight there in case Gregor was eating his lunch. She wandered along the main street
buying some milk, biscuits, tea bags and fruit to keep in her room. The town was really
busy, but it had that leisurely, friendly feeling about it that seaside towns had.

She might have only been there a day, but
she really liked it.

Gregor’s house was a big
gloomy-looking Victorian place, three storeys and double-fronted, with stone steps up to
a wide porch. The front door had stained-glass panels and was twice the width of
Eva’s front door back in London.

The door was opened by a very attractive
blonde woman wearing a floaty blue and white dress. She looked about forty, and Eva
guessed she must be Grace, Gregor’s sister.

‘I’m sorry to turn up here
uninvited,’ Eva began. ‘I was talking to Mrs Janet Mayhew about her cottage,
and she suggested I come up here to have a chat with Mr Hamilton, because he used to own
it.’

‘I’m sure Gregor will be
delighted to talk to you,’ the woman said. ‘Do come in, and I’ll just
check if everything is alright with him. What was your name?’

‘Eva Patterson,’ she said and
watched as the woman tip-tapped in her high heels across the parquet flooring to a door
at the back of the house.

The staircase was right at the centre of the
hall, very wide with intricately carved banisters and a carved hawk on each of the newel
posts. At the half-landing where the staircase
turned stood a complete
suit of armour, looking as if a man stood inside it, and above it on the wall were two
crossed battleaxes. Eva wanted to giggle, thinking that if Gregor was her father, she
would have to educate him into going for less intimidating decor.

‘Come on in, Eva,’ the blonde
woman called out from the back of the hall. ‘Gregor will be glad to talk to
you.’

Eva’s first thought on seeing Gregor,
sitting in an armchair by the window, was that he couldn’t possibly be her father,
as his hair was as red as her mother’s. She was sure two red-headed people
couldn’t produce anything but another redhead.

‘You’ll forgive me if I
don’t get up,’ he said. ‘I expect Janet told you that my legs are
useless now.’

His voice was beautiful – not just the
Scottish accent, but the depth of his voice – and he was a fine-looking man with strong
features, reminding her a little of the actor Liam Neeson.

‘She told me you had a climbing
accident. I’m so sorry,’ she said, walking over towards him to shake his
hand. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me, it is a bit of an imposition.’

‘Not at all.’ He smiled warmly
and he shook her hand very firmly. ‘What man wouldn’t like a visit from a
bonny lassie? And what can I do for you?’

‘My mother died earlier this year and
amongst her things I found a painting of Janet’s cottage. I believe Mum rented it
for a while in 1969. I am trying to find out more about that period in her life. As you
would’ve been her landlord then, I wonder if you remember her. Her name then was
Flora Foyle.’

The reaction to her mother’s name was
instantaneous. A light came into his blue eyes, and his mouth curved into a smile.

‘Flora! Aye, I do remember her, Eva,
very well. She rented the cottage for going on for a year. Do sit down, I hate looking
up at people.’

Eva took the sofa opposite his chair. She
explained about the diaries and said she believed her mother was depressed when she was
here.

‘I have to say that none of us really
recognized depression back then,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘People might refer
to someone as “having trouble with their nerves”. But as I recall, no one
realized it was an illness. As for Flora, I liked her a great deal. She was one of the
most interesting women I’d met at that time. With hindsight, perhaps she
was
depressed. But at the time I thought of her as fragile, moody and
temperamental. I was aware there was something troubling her, but I never did discover
what that was. I never heard from her again after she left here.’

‘She mentions someone called
“G” in her diaries. Was that you?’

‘Probably, I saw quite a lot of her.
May I know what she said?’

‘All nice things,’ Eva assured
him. ‘Nothing personal, you understand – hiking, camping, dinner with
you.’

He smiled. ‘Well, that’s
disappointing. Flora and I used to talk for hours, I told her stuff I’d never told
anyone before. I would’ve quite liked to be reminded of it all again
now.’

‘She did say you were a
soulmate,’ Eva said with a smile. ‘That’s a pretty good thing to say
about someone, isn’t it?’

‘Aye, that it is.’ He grinned.
‘I’d have preferred “devilishly handsome, irresistible, with the mind
of a rocket scientist”. But I have found we rarely get what we wish
for.’

Eva laughed. She liked his warmth and lack
of pomposity; she had expected a man who had lost the use of his legs to be bitter and
difficult. ‘Did Flora reciprocate with
confessions,
soul-searching or anything about her past?’ she asked. ‘You see, she never
did to me. I didn’t know she’d been a successful artist. I don’t even
know anything about her parents, or her childhood.’