Out of the Dark (5 page)

Knowing how he’d thrown all emotional and financial responsibility for her on to his deserted wife, Trish had thought it outrageous that he’d then tried to claim some kind of credit for what she’d become, which was what the timing of his approaches seemed to imply. Everything she’d achieved was thanks to Meg, her mother, who’d fought to make her feel as secure as anyone could. Meg had used her few formal skills to get a job as a doctor’s receptionist so that she could be at home when Trish got back from school, even though it had meant going out again to supervise late-evening surgeries. She’d never mentioned Paddy, except to say that he’d loved Trish and had gone only because of his own problems. And she’d encouraged Trish to work and pass every available exam so that she could go anywhere and be anything she wanted.

Grateful for all of it, admiring, devoted and absolutely on Meg’s side, Trish had felt it would be disloyal to have anything to do with her father. Only when Meg herself had heard of his approaches and had made it clear that she positively wanted Trish to get to know him, had she felt free to answer one of his letters. Eventually they’d met and slowly found a way to like each other. Then last year, when Paddy had had a heart attack and Trish had been afraid he would die, she’d let herself admit that she loved him.

Trusting him at last, she’d asked why he’d abandoned
them, hoping to make sense of the old betrayal and the anger that had propelled her into her career and out of a lot of relationships of her own. He’d told her that had seen it as the only way of controlling his urge to batter Meg. That second betrayal might not have hurt as much as the first, but the shock of it was with Trish still.

‘What about you, Paddy?’ she asked, fighting it back as she always did. After all, Meg had forgiven him, even for the time when he’d failed to control his violence and had put her in hospital.

‘Fine, too. Now, be a good child and don’t ask questions about me heart. ’Tis as good as new. Better than ever since the bypass.’

Child? she thought in a mixture of amusement and irritation. I haven’t been your child since you walked out thirty years ago.

‘Now, Bella and I were after taking you out to dinner. You will come, won’t you? With that fat boyfriend of yours out of the way, I’ll bet you’re not eating properly, and I don’t want my only child starving herself.’

‘He’s not fat,’ she said automatically and without emphasis. She wasn’t concentrating on either Paddy or George. Instead, running her fingers over her face, she counted up all the features she shared with David – and with Paddy.

But he’s sixty-three, she thought absurdly. Old enough to be David’s
grandfather.

‘Trish? Are you there?’

‘Yes, I’m here. I was distracted by something. Sorry. Yes, I’d like to have dinner. When?’

‘Tonight? We’ve found a nice little old-fashioned Italian restaurant just round the corner from Cottesmore Court. They still flame things in front of you and there are bottles in straw and Alpine soldiers’ boots and hats on the walls. You will come, won’t you? Bella’s still working, but she said she could get to the restaurant by nine.’

Reeling from the idea that David could be his son – and that she might well have loads of half-siblings she knew nothing about – Trish agreed.

‘But why don’t you and I meet at half past eight so that we can have a quiet father-and-daughter drink together first?’

‘That’d be great, Trish.’ He sounded surprised. ‘I’ll see you there at half eight, then.’

‘Right,’ she said, before putting down the mobile.

The light on her answering machine was flashing. Even though she knew there wouldn’t be one from George – the time difference made that thoroughly unlikely – she played the messages.

There was one from her mother, two from friends just back from holiday and wanting to see her, and one from Anna:

‘Trish, are you feeling any better? I felt very guilty after lunch, when I realised quite how much pressure I’d been putting on you when you were feeling frag. I hadn’t meant to. Do ring when you’ve got a minute.’

Trish picked up the phone. An apology from Anna was rare enough to need encouraging. Besides, it would be good to be distracted from Paddy and the idea that he might be responsible for David’s existence. Somehow Trish was going to have to find out, and she just couldn’t see herself asking him a direct question.

‘Anna?’ she said when her call was picked up. ‘Hi. It’s Trish. Thanks for your message. I’m fine. But you’re right, I was feeling fragile. I’m sorry I ran out on you.’

‘God, I’m glad. I had a sudden ghastly feeling that you might have … you know, when I talked about children. Trish, you looked so pale, you hadn’t just had a you know … Had you?’

‘What on earth are you talking about, Anna?’

‘An abortion. You hadn’t just had one, had you?’

‘No, Anna. Nothing like that.’ Intrusive questions Trish
could take, even though she didn’t like them. Sympathy would be impossible just now, so she wasn’t going to admit to the miscarriage.

‘Thank God for that.’ Anna’s sigh was deep enough to have come from one of the great whales. ‘I know I’m tactless, but I’d never have forgiven myself for that. Now, there’s a terrific film by a new Polish director on at the NFT next week. I’ve got a couple of tickets for Wednesday. Would you like to come?’

‘Why not? Thank you, Anna. I’ve got to dash now, so let’s talk on Wednesday morning about when to meet. Thanks for ringing. Bye.’

The restaurant was all Paddy had promised, with red-and-white gingham cloths and candles stuck in straw-basketed chianti bottles, and packets of grissini criss-crossed between the waterlily-shaped pink napkins. Trish and her father were both drinking Campari-soda to fit in with their surroundings. She liked the fact that he shared the joke so easily. He snapped another breadstick as she asked him when he’d met Bella. It wasn’t a very subtle way into the discussion she hoped would lead to information about David’s parentage, but it was the best she could do.

‘About seven years ago. Why?’

‘I just wondered who you were with before that, say nine or ten years ago.’ Trish was glad Antony Shelley couldn’t hear her clumsy questions. After all her years at the Bar she should have been better at cross-examination than this.

‘Why?’ Paddy’s face was tight with suspicion.

‘It was about then that you started trying to get in touch with me,’ she said casually.

Oddly enough, it was the truth, although she hadn’t been conscious of it until he’d asked his question. Was it a significant connection or a trivial coincidence? His first letters and phone messages had seemed creepy and self-serving at the time. But what if they’d been prompted by his discovery that he was about to have another child?
Could that have so shocked him that he’d needed to see how his first had turned out?

‘I’m trying to fill in the lost years, get to know you retrospectively,’ she said. Paddy was frowning now, but in cynical calculation, Trish thought, not anxiety, so she quickly improvised, adding: ‘What were you doing then – for work, I mean?’

‘Advising on personal development within corporate structures, just as I am now, but freelance, not as well, and not for nearly as much money. Trish, what is all this?’

‘And you had a girlfriend?’

‘Sure, and wasn’t I the broth of a boy, even if I was in my fifties?’

‘Don’t go stage Irish on me,’ she said, hating the way he used the fake brogue to deflect questions he didn’t want to answer. She still wasn’t sure whether it was a subconscious response to threat or a deliberately evasive tactic, but then she knew so little about him, in spite of a scary number of shared characteristics.

‘So who was she? Or
they,
if you were really such a broth of a boy?’

‘You mean you want a list? Leporello, eat your heart out.’

Who the hell’s Leporello, Trish wondered, until she remembered an uncomfortable evening at Glyndebourne, helping George with some client entertaining. As senior partner in his firm of solicitors, he had to do a lot of that, and Trish joined in whenever she could.

She wasn’t particularly musical, but she’d enjoyed
Don Giovanni
itself. What she’d passionately disliked about the evening was the pomposity of the other guests, the achingly long journey back into London afterwards, and the whole silliness of putting on evening dress at half-past two in the afternoon to flog out to deepest Sussex. If the weather had been good, it might have seemed less absurd as an entertainment for the kind of people who usually
gave the impression that they would be too busy to go to their own mother’s funeral. In the rain, the whole self-congratulatory pantomime had made her think of Thomas Aquinas’ gruesome theory that the pleasure of those in heaven would be greatly increased by the sight of the agony of those in hell.

‘I hope your list is fewer than
mille-tre
,’ she said, then despised herself for needing to prove she’d picked up his reference. From the glint in his black eyes, he knew exactly what she was doing – and what she felt about it.

‘By one or two.’ He smashed two grissini at once and sprayed crumbs all over the cloth.

‘So, who were they? Come on, Paddy. Stop being so coy.’

‘But why do you want to know?’

‘I told you. I want to fill in the lost years, get to know you as you were all the time I was being so silly and inventing all sorts of weird, unfair ideas about what kind of man you must be.’ That was better. That really might get him talking.

The glint dimmed in his eyes. Disappointment or reassurance? She couldn’t tell.

‘For God’s sake, Trish,’ he said, looking at something over her shoulder.

‘Please, Paddy. It’s very important to me to know the truth about how you lived while I might have known you but didn’t.’

‘Look, I had only one girlfriend at the time. If I give you her name, will you shut up about it now?’

‘So long as you add her address.’

‘Why? I warn you, Trish, I will not have you banging on her door, badgering her with questions.’

‘D’you really suppose she still lives in the same place after ten years?’ Trish said, refusing to offer a direct lie about her intentions. She might not go banging on
the door, but she was definitely intending to pursue the woman.

Expecting Paddy to refuse, she was surprised when he took an old envelope out of his pocket and began to write fast and untidily, muttering, ‘See to Bella, will you?’

Trish glanced over her shoulder, to see her father’s current partner in the doorway of the restaurant, looking around for him. No wonder he’d suddenly turned cooperative. The last thing he’d want would be Bella catching him discussing one of her many predecessors. Happy enough to fulfil her part of the bargain, Trish waited until the head waiter had stopped kissing Bella, then took his place.

Bella looked surprised but pleased, saying when they’d both straightened up, ‘You’re looking very well, Trish. Paddy was sure you’d be starving yourself into a knitting needle with George away.’

‘I may not be nearly such a good cook as George,’ Trish said, as she stood between Bella and the table, ‘but even I can boil a cauliflower and open a pot of yoghurt. Shall we order your drink while we’re here, to save time? They spend so long kissing new arrivals that it takes ages to get them to bring anything to the table.’

Bella turned to the waiter and said she’d like a glass of prosecco, please. Then she and Trish joined Paddy. Trish saw the folded envelope in her place and discreetly put it in her bag while Paddy gave Bella a quite unnecessarily theatrical kiss. Trish wondered whether he was giving her time to get the envelope out of sight or punishing her for digging into his past. She knew her mother wouldn’t have minded the evidence of his passion for Bella, but that didn’t make it any easier for his daughter to watch.

This business of treating your parents as one adult to another was tough, Trish had found long ago. Ashamed of her truculence, she set out to be entertaining. It was
worth the effort. Bella stopped talking to her as though she were a potentially temperamental invalid that night, and they discovered a lot of shared ground. At one moment, Paddy even told them to stop excluding him. They both laughed then, and agreed to order zabaglione all round, even though the menu and the waiter both warned that they’d have to wait twenty minutes for it.

Trish drove home at the end of the long evening understanding both her parents better than she ever had. If a woman like Bella could have spent seven years with Paddy, it was no longer so surprising that Trish’s mother, Meg, had once loved him enough to marry him and have a child – and even to make light of his drinking and the violence that had followed it. Meg had always claimed that Paddy had only hit her once, but Trish’s professional experience of domestic assaults made that hard to believe.

It was far too late to do anything about contacting his old girlfriend tonight, but Trish couldn’t resist seeing where she’d lived. Unfolding the envelope Paddy had given her, she saw that he’d added a note at the bottom.
Don’t go stirring up trouble now, Trish.

She knew she couldn’t promise that. If David turned out to be the product of one of Paddy’s affairs, bringing the information to light would do a lot more than cause trouble. But she couldn’t leave the boy unclaimed in hospital without being sure she’d done everything she could to establish his identity. He’d had her name and address in his fleece, so someone close to him knew all about her. She had to do what she could to find out who he was, however damaging that might be.

To her surprise, Sylvia Bantell was still listed in the phone book above the same address Paddy had known. Trish rang her next morning from chambers. She answered the phone briskly, giving her name rather than her number, which suggested both confidence and recklessness.

‘Hello. I’m sorry to disturb you. My name’s Trish Maguire. I’m—’

‘Not Paddy’s famous daughter?’ The lightly drawling voice sounded full of amusement.

‘You mean he told you about me?’

‘Never stopped boasting about you, my dear. Banged on and on for hours and hours about how clever you were, how successful, how beautiful. I used to think you must be the most exasperating brat in the entire world.’

‘I’m not surprised.’ Beautiful? Trish considered her spiky hair and beaked nose. What was he thinking of? But of course, he didn’t know me then. ‘I can’t imagine why he should have done anything like that. He hadn’t seen me for over twenty years.’

‘He knew more than enough about you. He could have bored for England on the subject. How is the old bastard anyway?’

‘Not bad. He had a heart attack, then a bypass, last year. But he’s over both now.’

‘Did he ask you to get in touch with me?’

‘God no! No, this is private enterprise. I wanted to ask you … This is frightfully difficult, you know.’ Trish thought that Mrs Bantell’s Kensington idiom must be catching. ‘Frightful’ wasn’t one of her words. ‘I wanted to know whether you and he …’

‘We had a bit of gallop and jump together, if that’s what you’re asking. But we were both unmarried at the time and well over the age of consent. What’s the problem?’

‘No problem. Look, I’m sorry, it’s a hard thing to say, but you and he never had a child, did you?’ She wondered why it seemed so much easier to ask a total stranger than her father.

A chime of musical laughter sounded through the phone.

‘Oh, poor Trish. Have you been worrying about losing your status as Paddy’s unique and perfect offspring?’

‘Not quite that.’ Suddenly she was back in the A & E
department at Dowting’s, looking not at David’s mashed-up face, but at the sympathetic nurse who’d told her what to expect after her miscarriage.

‘Well, you don’t have to worry. If you could see me you wouldn’t have had to ask. I’m a year or two older than Paddy and even when we were together I was well past the Change.’

‘Oh, I see. I’m so sorry. It’s very kind of you to have been so frank. And I’m sorry to have bothered you.’

‘That’s all right. I find the idea quite funny actually. But you obviously don’t. What exactly is it that’s bugging you so much? Paddy hasn’t been winding you up and telling you I had his infant, has he?’

‘Absolutely not. And he doesn’t know I’m asking questions. You won’t tell him, will you?’

‘My dear, I wouldn’t dream of it. We haven’t been in contact for nine years or more,’ Sylvia Bantell said drily. ‘But if you see the old bastard, you might tell him I’ve forgiven him.’

‘Forgiven him for what?’

‘He’ll know,’ said Mrs Bantell darkly. After a moment’s silence, she added in an unconvincingly casual voice, ‘Actually, I booted him out when I found I hadn’t acquired exclusive rights to his attention. He was a shocker, you know.’

Now, why are you telling me this, Trish wondered. It sounds like punishment, but you can’t still want retribution for the boredom of listening to him talk about my supposed virtues all those years ago. Is it Paddy himself you’re after?

She said nothing, assuming there was more to come.

‘And, Trish?’

‘Yes?’

‘You don’t actually sound quite as exasperating as I thought you would.’

‘I’m glad,’ Trish said, still waiting. There were a lot of
questions she wanted to ask, but she wasn’t going to join in whatever game Sylvia might be playing with her.

‘Oh, all right, I’ll tell you.’ The drawly voice had sharpened. ‘You see, one evening he let something slip that made it clear he was seeing someone else. I was so angry I put private detectives on him.’

‘Ah, I see. Thank you for telling me.’

‘Don’t you even want to know who she was?’

‘Only if you want to tell me.’

‘She was a prostitute called Jeannie Nest, and she lived in a disgusting slum south of the river. When I found out … Well, I can tell you I was round to the quack straight away to get checked out.’

This is definitely punishment, thought Trish, torn between an instinct to choke off Sylvia’s vindictiveness and a need to know everything. The mention of ‘south of the river’ seemed too significant to ignore.

‘Where exactly did she live?’

‘I thought you might ask that,’ Sylvia said, sounding satisfied enough to justify Trish’s suspicion. ‘Hang on and I’ll get the report.’

Four minutes later she was back. ‘The Mull Estate, Southwark. Sixty-three, Kingston Buildings specifically. It’ll be tough for you if there really was a baby from that relationship. I can’t imagine many successful barristers wanting to acknowledge some tart’s child from the slums as their half-sibling.’

‘I’m surprised you kept a report like that for so long,’ Trish said, too angry now to suppress everything she felt. ‘What were you planning to do with it? Blackmail him?’

‘That’s offensive – and ridiculous. If you must know, I assumed he was suffering a temporary bout of
nostalgie de la boue.
Some chaps do. So I waited until he was ready to come back. Then, when I had him at my mercy, I was going to rub his nose in the filth of what he’d been doing.’

‘Ah,’ Trish said, glad to know she hadn’t been unfair to the woman. ‘So that you could punish him, you mean?’

‘So that I could show him precisely why I would never have anything to do with him ever again. Touch a tart’s leavings? Ugh!’