Only a Mother Knows (31 page)

It wasn’t long before he was back, inviting Olive into the car out of the brisk west wind.

‘Oh, I’m glad to see you, Archie,’ Olive said, smiling although her teeth were beginning to chatter. ‘It is so cold out there. I’m sure we’ll soon have snow.’

‘You said that last year and we didn’t, and the year before if I remember correctly,’ Archie said with one of his most disarming grins, causing Olive to feel a sudden rush of heat to her freezing cheeks.

‘What a good memory you have Sergeant Dawson.’ Olive was suddenly aware of their close proximity to one another, and as she watched Archie looking out of the window, his eyes always on duty, she realised how tired he appeared. He had been working all the hours God sent after his wife died and she wondered if he was running from the truth. Olive, taking stock, reckoned that if he kept working as hard as he had been lately he would not have to face up to what had happened. It was all so very, very sad.

‘She never did get over losing our boy,’ Archie said, reading Olive’s thoughts with unerring accuracy. ‘In some ways she blamed herself but …’

‘Nobody could be to blame, Archie, it was God’s will.’ Olive fleetingly covered his hand with hers. It was a small gesture, meant to reassure her friend. But Archie turned to her now and he looked at her, really looked at her, his dark eyes so close to hers that she could see the huge pupils searching her face, her eyes, her hair.

‘Oh, Olive, I shouldn’t feel this way but I do … I’m glad she is at peace with our son. I haven’t been able to grieve because it was what she wanted for so long. If anything I feel angry sometimes that she took the easy way out, leaving me with all the heartache and …’

‘Don’t torture yourself, Archie, it’s not right, you did everything you possibly could and more. You have nothing to blame yourself for.’

Archie touched her shoulder and gave a tight smile. It was a small gesture but it was done with such warmth that it spoke a thousand words and Olive realised that she had spent so long trying to avoid local gossip that she had actually neglected her very true friend. And he was a friend, the best she could ever have.

‘They caught them, you know,’ Archie said suddenly, confusing Olive momentarily.

‘Who caught who, Archie?’ Olive’s brows puckered.

‘Those spivs who were tormenting Barney and young Freddy. We caught them red-handed in number 49, they were using it as a hiding place for all the loot they pinched from bombed-out houses and, would you believe it, even graveyards … The buggers have got no respect for the living or the dead and we got them banged to rights.’

‘Oh, well done, Archie!’ Olive could not contain her delight and she reached across to the driver’s seat and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Then, feeling suddenly embarrassed at her impulsive performance, Olive sank back into her own seat as the uneasy silence that filled the small interior of the car began to close in on her. She had never done anything so spontaneous in all her life before. Quickly, she turned her head and looked out of the side window to hide the obvious tinge of colour her act had brought on and found the scudding clouds immensely interesting.

After a short while she turned and looked straight ahead beyond the windscreen, engrossed in the stark landscape beyond the farmhouse, whilst out of the corner of her eye she could see Archie was doing exactly the same thing. Neither of them said a word and Olive was only too aware that if they so wished, her light, friendly kiss could have been taken further. Much further.

If Agnes had dreams of a loving father shedding a tear whilst waiting with outstretched arms for her to fall into, then she was sadly mistaken. The door was opened almost immediately and she was greeted, if she could call it that, by a wizened old man who was bent double and had no teeth, reminding Agnes, to her dismay, of a character in a Punch and Judy show she had watched with other children from the orphanage.

‘Come in, come in, come in, you’re letting all the heat out,’ he said in a grumpy voice. Agnes did as she was told and entered the wide expanse of hallway with four bare-wood doors leading off it, which gave way to a dark, narrow staircase running up the middle of the farmhouse to the floor above. The hallway wasn’t very bright as the small high windows were quite dingy and by the looks of it, she thought, hadn’t seen a chamois leather for many a long year. But she wasn’t here to criticise. She was here to meet her father. And looking at this cantankerous old man, she now wished she hadn’t bothered.

‘So, you are Agnes, I presume,’ the old man said in the local accent, which had Agnes straining her ears and wondering if it would be too much of an effort for him to raise his voice a little.

‘Yes, I’m Agnes, and you must be Mr Weybridge?’ My father, she thought, although she didn’t say so when she held out her hand, which he ignored. She hadn’t expected him to look so stern and forbidding. If she was honest, Agnes wasn’t sure what she had expected.

‘Must I now?’ the old man said, looking her up and down. ‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong, see.’ He dragged his feet to one of the four doors in slow, painful steps and silently beckoned her to follow.

‘Mr Weybridge is in ’ere. You’ll do well to wait until he speaks to you first. And keep your ’ands to yourself, you never know as what folk ’ave on theirs.’ Agnes shuddered; she had a good idea what the old man was talking about, this being a farm.

Agnes was led to the room opposite and her surprise on entering was evident in her low gasp. She hadn’t expected to see a gleaming, oxblood leather sofa and matching high-winged leather chairs in the richly furnished room, nor the highly polished sideboard and occasional tables. It was the kind of room a gentleman would use, she thought, not the kind of room a farmer would live in.

‘We don’t live like animals just because we rear them,’ said a low voice from the vicinity of the winged chair near the roaring fire. Agnes turned quickly.

‘Thank you, Darnley,’ said the man who was sitting near the blazing fire, his thinning white hair damp as if not long combed down with water, his legs hidden beneath a plaid woollen blanket.

The solicitor had subsequently given her more information in a letter about this man whom she presumed was her father. Apparently he had fought on the Somme and had been injured; perhaps that was why he needed the blanket whilst sitting in front of a roaring fire, she reasoned as Darnley shuffled out without saying a word. On closer assessment she realised that Mr Weybridge was much younger than she first assumed. However, her thoughts were curtailed when he gave a low chuckle.

‘I keep Darnley on instead of a guard dog,’ he said, not rising from the chair, directing Agnes with a wave of his hand to the other chair opposite his own, whilst a portly woman of indeterminate age brought a tray of tea things.

Before any conversation resumed, the woman filled the cups, cut two slices of rich-looking dark fruit cake and headed for the door. Agnes felt her tension mounting as the man sitting opposite took it all in and said nothing until the door was well and truly shut. Then, lifting his cup and saucer with the delicacy of a man holding a new-born kitten, he said in a kindly voice, ‘So, you are Agnes?’ Although his face had a yellowish hue and his hair was white as snow, Agnes could see that in his youth he must have been a very handsome man. She nodded, unable to speak, as she watched her father hold the bone china cup and saucer so carefully in his amazingly clean hands, and wondered if he had ever held her with so much care. And at once she felt awkward sitting here in the sitting room of a farmhouse she couldn’t even remember.

‘We called you Angela, your mother and I,’ he said, looking at her now with a mixture of curiosity and something else she could not fathom. Angela, Agnes thought, she liked the name. She would have been proud to be known by such a name given the chance. This was indeed a revelation. She didn’t know she had even been given a name before being left on the orphanage step.

Her curiosity was reaching fever pitch now, and she longed to ask if he had married her mother, yet no matter how hard she tried Agnes could not bring herself to be so forward. Instead, she hung onto every word this man was now saying, whilst all the time plucking up the courage to ask the questions spinning in her head.

‘What I am about to tell you must not be breathed to a soul, do you hear me?’

Agnes nodded, realising he must think she was struck dumb; she had not yet said a word.

‘Before I go any further, I will put you out of your misery, as I am sure you are eager to know the truth. I can now tell you that your mother and I were married. But that is between you and me. The hired hands don’t need to know – if they did … Well, suffice to say, they don’t need to know.’

‘Oh, that is such a relief,’ thought Agnes, sighing, even whilst she wondered why the hired hands did not need to know. The question almost sprang to her lips but her sense of propriety stopped her. Her silence encouraged Mr Weybridge to continue.

‘We could not marry until your mother was long into her pregnancy. You see, my first wife, Sarah, had been ailing for a long time; she was struck down by a seizure of the brain. For fourteen years she had been bed-bound. Your mother, Peg, was her nurse.’ He paused. ‘My life was very lonely out here before Peg came to nurse Sarah …’ He cleared his throat, obviously troubled by the raking up of old memories, and he stared into the fire as if gathering his thoughts whilst Agnes patiently waited for him to resume. A few moments later, composed now, he reached to the table beside his chair and said in a firm, somewhat impatient voice, ‘But none of that matters now. This is what you want to see, I am sure.’ He held out the certificate Agnes had so longed for all these years. Taking it she read the perfect copperplate handwriting on the official document telling her who her mother and father were.

Agnes could clearly see that the revelation was causing him considerable distress. And even though she was eager to know all she could about her mother, she could not, for some strange reason, bear to see him so upset.

‘Not only this … Mr Weybridge,’ she said tentatively, ‘you will let me come back another time when we have both had time to …?’ Agnes, too, was quite overwhelmed.

He nodded before taking a sip of his tea, and then, replacing the delicate cup onto the matching saucer, he looked at her and smiled before saying contemplatively, ‘You are very much like your mother.’

Agnes felt her heart soar as she had noticed immediately on entering the room that the difference between her and Mr Weybridge was stark, she being so slight and delicately fair, whilst his withered body had obviously once been large and strong. His weather-beaten skin was yellowing now but she could see he had been a handsome man.

Agnes sighed, knowing that even though she desperately wanted more information from him, she couldn’t press him because he looked so exhausted, and despite the curiosity burning inside her she could not put him through any more strife. It was enough for now that she had the proof of her birth, which clearly showed who she really was.

‘I am so glad you were able to come and collect it yourself,’ he said when she could not take her eyes from the precious document that showed she was not illegitimate, no matter how close the wedding was to her birth.

‘I would have come here sooner … had I known.’ Agnes felt a new, self-assured spirit.

‘We had six precious weeks together as man and wife,’ her father said in a low, faraway voice as if talking to himself. ‘We had a terrible time bringing you into the world, and afterwards … .’ His voice trailed off briefly before he resumed. ‘You took all of Peg’s strength, you see, and she never recovered. I couldn’t even look at you.’ There was a catch in his voice and Agnes assumed he was still grieving. Did he mean that her mother’s death was her fault?

‘You see, I blamed you for her suffering …’ He looked into the blazing fire again and the spitting, crackling flames were illuminated in his eyes as he returned in his mind to another time. ‘The last word she spoke was your name, Angela.’ He didn’t look at Agnes. ‘That was the finish of me; I knew I would never be able to bring you up and so handed you to old Bertha and told her never to bring you back again.’

‘Is she the woman who brought in the tea?’ Agnes looked towards the door.

‘No, that’s Darnley’s wife, she came up from the village afterwards; oh, don’t look so stricken, I had my reasons.’ His words were growing weak and he finished with a racking cough that caused him to gasp for breath and turned his once-sallow complexion the colour of a ripened plum. Agnes took the cup and saucer from his juddering hands in case he dropped them.

‘As you might have guessed,’ he sighed when the spasm passed, ‘I am dying. I have a disease of the lung …’ He paused to get his breath back, and then his mood seemed to brighten a little. ‘I don’t want to go to your mother and get an ear-bashing for not having provided for you.’

‘It is a bit late to realise that now,’ Agnes said, her strong sense of right and wrong reasserting itself, ‘twenty years too late.’ Then, regretting her outburst she realised that he was trying to make amends at least, and he probably felt remorse enough. ‘Maybe this was all I ever wanted,’ she conceded, raising the birth certificate. Strangely, she wanted him to feel a little of the hurt he had forced upon her by not giving her the upbringing every child deserved. But, looking at him now, weak and infirm, Agnes knew she could not sustain her anger; it wasn’t in her nature to be horrid or unkind – even to the man who had given her away all those years ago. ‘I know who I am and where I come from now, and so maybe that is enough for me.’

‘You don’t know what it means to me to hear you say that.’ He gave a painful smile. Then he looked at her for a long while and Agnes felt he was trying to make peace when he said, ‘Thank you very much for coming to see me. It makes things much easier now.’

Agnes didn’t know what he meant nor what to say.

‘You will never know how sorry I am that I rejected you.’ He lowered his head. ‘The shame and the guilt I have carried around for the last twenty years have eaten me alive, and this is my punishment now.’ He waved a feeble hand. ‘I never should have abandoned you.’