Grave Doubts (34 page)

‘How could you?’ She threw the words back over her shoulder towards Amelia’s ashen face and fled the church.

The rain soaked her head at once, chilling her. She pulled up her hood and ran on, glad that her tears would be washed away.

By the time she reached Mill Farm she was exhausted and bitterly regretting her outburst in the church. What had she been thinking? She’d engaged in manipulative interviewing techniques, only to be trapped by them into an emotional display it would be hard to forget. Amelia must think her dangerously unstable. Their friendship was probably finished. She didn’t regret that quite as much as she knew that she should given the woman’s kindness towards her but she still felt guilty.

Evening fell with the steady rain and she went to bed ridiculously early. An alien noise woke her. By the light of the torch by her bed she checked the time: ten to ten. She’d been in bed either one or thirteen hours and was too disorientated to work out which it was.

There was another noise outside. Nightingale struggled into jeans and shoes and went to investigate. Perhaps a violent gust of wind had woken her but she knew that she’d be unable to sleep until she had made sure that she was on her own.

She’d reached the top of the stairs when she heard a loud clang. It was the distinctive sound of an old milking pail being knocked over and she knew exactly where she had left it, by the back door. She switched off her torch and waited for her eyes to readjust to the dark.

The drumming of the blood in her ears mimicked the sound of the rain outside as she made her way silently downstairs, remembering to step over the rotten corner treads that would barely take her weight. Outside faint light trickled around into the yard from the front of the house. Inside the dark was impenetrable. She shuffled forwards, using her left hand to find the kitchen table and chairs whilst she grasped the torch firmly in her right.

A sudden banging at the back door almost made her cry out in fear.

‘Louise? Louise are you there?’ It was a woman’s voice. Amelia.

With a curse softened by relief Nightingale switched on her torch and opened the door. Alcohol fumes hit her.

‘Oh thank God! I saw the house in darkness and I thought… Oh never mind what I thought. You’re all right, thank God. Hang on a sec while I go round to the front and turn my car lights off before they flatten the battery.’

She clattered off with the torch. Nightingale lit the lamps and was encouraging the Aga back to full heat when her visitor returned.

‘You’re soaked through, Amelia. Sit here and get warm. Tea or hot toddy?’

‘Hot toddy please.’

Why was she not surprised?

Amelia stretched her hands and feet towards the stove and sighed deeply.

‘That’s better.’

‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘I was worried about you. I kept thinking about what you’d said, about how I should have shown compassion. And you were in such a state. The more I thought about you the more concerned I became. In the end I just had to come and make sure you were all right.’ She shook her head. ‘I feel a fool now of course, and it seems I got you out of bed.’

‘Don’t worry. Here, take this.’ The water wasn’t quite boiling but it was warm enough.

Amelia took such a long drink that Nightingale felt obliged to refresh her glass at once. She felt a little guilty that her outburst had caused a sixty-something lady to drive on unmade roads through darkness on a filthy night. But she didn’t feel guilty enough to avoid trying to take advantage of the other woman’s concerns.

‘Have you come to tell me?’

‘But you already know.’

‘I need to hear it out loud to believe it.’

‘I’ve said nothing for so very long, not even to Ruth, although I’m sure your father told her. How did you find out?’

‘By reading my aunt’s papers, finding photographs, matching the dates I know with entries in her diaries.’

Amelia took another long drink then rested her forehead against the warm glass.

‘I should have realised. You’re so bright, just like your mother. Of course you were going to find out. Well at least I won’t be breaking my promise if you already know. Your father made me swear on the Bible in the church a few days after you were born. He kept coming to see me quite often for a while,’ she smiled wistfully then grew sad, ‘but his visits tailed off and soon stopped altogether.’

Amelia took another drink and looked surprised that there had been so little left. Nightingale made them both fresh toddies, hers weak, Amelia’s full-bodied, and brought cheese and biscuits to the table.

‘Go on.’

‘He was upset for weeks, torn apart with grief. I can’t describe it. We would often hold each other and cry together. When he came to my house that night, George was away of course as he always bloody was, I thought he was looking for Lulu but it was me he’d come to see.’ She smiled, triumphant. ‘I just hugged him until he could speak.’

Nightingale leant back from the circle of lamplight so that her face was in shadow and her look of confusion hidden. She was baffled by Amelia’s words but held her silence, afraid that a question would stop the flow. Amelia drank more of the toddy, her eyes bright with the memories she was reliving.

‘You know it’s such a relief to be able to talk at last. Ever since you arrived I’ve thought of nothing else. The memories bang around inside my head. When you walked into the church that first Sunday I thought I should have a heart attack.’

‘You knew who I was?’

‘Of course. Father Patrick had told us that Henry’s daughter might be coming and when you walked in it was obvious. You look exactly like her. It’s quite extraordinary. Oh there’s a trace of your father in the set of your jaw and you have his eyes, but there was no doubting who you were even though you’re tall whereas Lulu was a petite little thing…’

She couldn’t breathe suddenly. The sense of panic was so strong that she found she was panting in breaths that failed to deliver sufficient oxygen. Amelia was oblivious. Her cheeks were rosy, her eyes shone as she wittered on. Nightingale brought her breathing under control and made her face expressionless.

‘Louise?’

Nightingale reached out to add whisky to her weak toddy and was alarmed at the uncontrollable tremor in her hands.

‘Louise are you all right? You’re shaking all over.’

She managed a nod that she hoped was convincing but the look on Amelia’s face told her it was not. A long drink of the toddy didn’t help.

‘I’m fine.’ Except that her voice now made it obvious that she wasn’t.

‘You didn’t know.’ Amelia was horrified. ‘You tricked me!’

The accusation stung some sense into Nightingale.

‘That’s not true. I’d found out that my father’s affair had continued right up to and after his marriage and that I…that he’d…but not that I was…that…’ Her voice trailed away and she shook her head in denial. ‘I don’t understand. I have my birth certificate. It can’t be true.’

The older woman’s anger disappeared in the face of Nightingale’s obvious misery. She reached out a work-reddened hand and patted Nightingale’s, still gripped about the toddy glass.

‘Did you never suspect? Were there no doubts?’

Nightingale recalled her sense of displacement, constant arguments with her parents, her mother’s icy exactness and denial of love. She nodded.

‘When I became a teenager – but I put their treatment of me down to disappointment.’ She lowered her head on to the rough wood of the table. ‘Oh God! I even accused my mother once of pretending that I was her daughter when I wasn’t.’ The memory chilled her and she shivered. ‘That was when she thrust the birth certificate in my face.’

The vision of her mother’s fury and the fragile piece of paper waved like a flag of victory reappeared in her mind. She had snatched it from her mother – but she was going to have to stop thinking of her like that – from Mary, and read every word. There was no mention of her middle, preferred name, Louise. The real reason for the apparent omission was obvious now. She wasn’t Diane Nightingale.

‘What happened to the other baby, to Diane?’

‘She died, aged one day. Your mother, sorry Mary, had the twins at Mill Farm. They were a little premature but well and a good weight so the midwife said they were fine to stay at home. The Doctor sorted your mother out and that was that. Diane was the smaller of the two but she was healthy enough when she was born. Neither of them gave any cause for concern.’

‘And when she died, they decided to adopt me.’

Amelia shifted uncomfortably but kept her free hand on Nightingale’s wrist as she sipped her own drink.

‘It didn’t work out quite like that. You were born the night after the twins, a full term baby. Lulu had come back to the village to live with your aunt but she hadn’t registered with a doctor. She was a wild child, back to nature, all of that. She wanted a natural birth and persuaded Ruth to be her “birthing partner” I think she called it. Your aunt was nervous but she was so besotted with Lulu that she went along with it.’

The contempt in Amelia’s voice made Nightingale draw her hands away under the pretence of taking another drink.

‘Then your father and m…Mary arrived unannounced in August and Lulu had to leave the farm. I put her up at my house. George was away on a trip to the Middle East otherwise I would have said no but Ruth was a decent friend and…’

‘My father begged you?’

‘How did you guess that?’ It was so clear to Nightingale that Amelia would have done anything for her father that she didn’t bother to answer. ‘I didn’t want her upsetting Mary.’

‘You mean upsetting my father, don’t you? You still loved him. He knew that and of course he would turn to you if there was a problem.’

It was clear from the expression on Amelia’s face that she’d taken the comment as a compliment.

‘Please go on, for my father’s sake. You were such a true friend to him, don’t fail his daughter now. He would want me to know the whole truth.’

‘I’m not sure.’ Amelia drained her drink and looked hopefully at the bottle. Nightingale made another toddy, willing the alcohol to relax Amelia’s inhibitions.

‘Whatever you did, I’m sure it was for love of my father.’ Nightingale forced a smile although she felt an emotion close to hatred inside.

‘Oh it was, it was. Trust me. And of course, it was better for you too, my dear. Just promise me you won’t be angry. It was all done for the best.’

Nightingale’s mind had become ruthlessly sharp despite the feebleness of her physical reaction. She had always been logical and this was something she could cling to as the foundations of her world crumbled. Why did her true mother give her up? How could she have borne to part with her own baby? And why on earth had her father’s wife accepted his lover’s child? She shrugged and the other woman seemed to take it for acceptance.

Amelia settled into the chair and continued her story.

‘Diane died suddenly. Your father put her in her cot at eight o’clock in the evening, next to Simon. Mary had kept to her bed after the birth although it was an easy one. She was exhausted and tearful. Nowadays they’d call it postnatal depression but we just thought that she had a fit of the blues and that it would pass.

‘At ten o’clock Simon started crying for his next feed and your father took him through to the kitchen. They were both on bottles. I don’t know why your mother couldn’t or wouldn’t breast feed. Anyway, your father fed and changed Simon then went back for Diane. He thought she was fast asleep so he carried her downstairs…he was still carrying her in her little sleep suit when he arrived at my door. He’d run through the woods in his nightclothes…hadn’t even stopped to put on a coat.’ Amelia paused to take another drink.

‘Lulu had gone to bed hours before but I was still up. He was almost hysterical by the time he arrived. I took him into the kitchen and he put the baby on the table. I unwrapped the blanket from around her and could tell at once that she was dead. I felt for a pulse to please him but it was clear she’d gone.

‘We drank some whisky and he cried in my arms for a long time. He didn’t know what to do. Mary was so depressed already and he thought this would push her over the edge. He fantasised that perhaps she hadn’t realised she’d had twins but I put him straight on that, of course a mother would know.

‘In the end, he left the dead baby with me and went back to the farm. He was going to tell Mary when she woke in the morning, not before.’

‘And I was born that night.’ It was a statement, not a question. Amelia nodded and blinked tears away from her eyes. ‘Did you persuade my mother to give me up?’

She was amazed at the coolness of her voice when she was having to breathe deeply to prevent nausea from overwhelming her. Amelia shook her head.

‘That’s not quite what happened.’

When Amelia looked up into her shadowed face she flinched and turned away.

‘You must tell me. Father would expect it.’

‘I know.’ Amelia nodded. ‘You have to understand, your father was distraught, not just with grief but with fear for your mother’s, sorry, Mary’s state of mind. And Lulu, well she was a lovely girl in a superficial sort of way, but flighty and high-spirited. She was an artist. Who knows what sort of mother she’d have made. She led a bohemian life, never staying with a man for long.’

Nightingale pressed her lips together to prevent an outburst that would only alienate this woman but inside she was burning with indignation for her mother – impregnated then left by her father to fend for herself and to be maligned by his friends.

‘Lulu went into labour about two in the morning, after your father had left. It all happened incredibly quickly. I’d been a nurse not a trained midwife, but I had no chance to call a doctor. Her waters broke and within an hour she was in the final stages.

‘When you were born you didn’t cry straight away and I thought you might be dead too. I wrapped you in a hand towel and I brought you downstairs. Something, perhaps the change of temperature, made you hiccough and your eyes opened but you still didn’t cry, you just made a little mewing sound.’

Amelia had to stop. Tears soaked her cheeks and she sobbed for some time. Nightingale said nothing. She had guessed what happened next but it was part of Amelia’s penance to admit it. The older woman blew her nose and sniffed loudly.