East of Innocence (25 page)

She is known in Starbucks and they ask her if she wants her usual; I order a cappuccino but when I try to pay nurse Abbotts will not allow me.

‘As bad as drinking alcohol,’ she says. ‘Lord knows I try, but without my coffee I’m useless as a hen.’ She sighs to herself in disappointment at her weakness and we wait in silence while our coffees are prepared. We take them to a table and now I cannot wait any longer and I say, ‘Please. What do you know about my mother?’

Nurse Abbotts smells her coffee, then looks at me. She has a small silver crucifix around her neck and I can see the shape of her collarbones underneath her skin.

‘She was a good cleaner, your mother,’ says Nurse Abbotts. ‘Ordinarily I wouldn’t remember a cleaner, but Marcela, she was with us a long time. Years, maybe, goodness, maybe five years it would have been.’

‘Was she okay?’

‘She was a sad woman. I believe that she had led a difficult life. We all knew that she had lost a child, but she never
told us how it happened.’ She looks at me. ‘But she didn’t lose you, because here you are as large as life. Even larger, goodness knows.’

‘She was taken away from me. Against her will.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ she says. ‘The poor girl.’

‘But she wasn’t… hurt?’

‘Hurt? No, least, not physically. She was a beautiful girl but I so rarely saw her smile.’ Nurse Abbotts tries her coffee and exhales with pleasure, then remembers where she is and puts it down. ‘I would ask for her, on our ward,’ she says. ‘The only time, in thirty years here. But your mother, she had a way about her.’ She pauses, losing herself for a moment in thoughts of the past. ‘She would always work nights. Never days. Never saw her during the day, in all those years.’

Nurse Abbotts drinks more coffee and I am silent; I do not want to interrupt her reminiscences, as if she is in a trance, which, if broken, will cause me to lose my mother for good. ‘There are two kinds of nurses,’ she says eventually. ‘There are the kind who see it as a job, and those who… You know what I mean by a calling?’

‘A career you are naturally adept at,’ I say.

Nurse Abbotts chuckles. ‘One way of putting it, child,’ she says. ‘I have never heard it described that way before.’ She chuckles some more. ‘Your mother was a cleaner, but her way with people, she was naturally adept. Yes she was. I would have her on the ward and my nurses, they would give out pills, do their job. But your mother, she had the touch. The number of times I saw her with her arm around some poor new mother, reassuring her, just talking.’ Nurse
Abbotts shakes her head sadly and her right hand instinctively caresses her crucifix. ‘Just talking to them, and her with no child of her own.’

‘So what happened to her?’

‘We had a pregnant girl on the ward, her baby was not well. The heartbeat, we kept losing it. We gave her an emergency caesarean but it was too late, the poor baby died before we could get her out. There is no sound more distressing than the cries of a young mother who has lost her baby, the grief. Of course we hear it all the time but there is so much pain, so much… And we have so little time, we are always so busy…’ Nurse Abbotts looks out of the window, into the street, lost again for a moment. She turns back to me with a smile. ‘Your mother stayed up with this poor girl, stayed with her until her parents came the next morning. The next night the same thing. I believe the third night she was not supposed to work but she came in anyway, and of course I did not say anything. I was glad to have her.’

A man in a suit holding a coffee nudges past our table, jostling Nurse Abbotts as he passes. He does not apologise and I am half out of my seat before I feel Nurse Abbotts’s hand on mine again. I look down and she is chuckling. I am no great admirer of religion, but clearly Nurse Abbotts’s faith makes her impervious to fear; or perhaps it is simply her innate nature. Either way, she reacts to my latent aggression with an amused indulgence.

‘What are you doing, child? Sit yourself back down.’ She tuts to herself. ‘I can see you’re an angry one.’ The amused light dies from her eyes. ‘But what am I saying? Poor child
like you, and growing up without a mother.’ She wags a finger at me. ‘Get you in trouble much, that temper of yours?’

‘Now and then.’

‘Now and then he says.’ She tuts some more. ‘I should think so. She wouldn’t be impressed, let me tell you.’

‘She’, Marcela, my mother, had formed some kind of bond with the bereaved girl over the course of those three nights, Nurse Abbotts explains to me. Perhaps it was a shared sense of bereavement; perhaps my mother really had found her calling, offering comfort to a girl she could identify with, whose pain approached the levels of her own. Whatever connection they forged, it carried over to the girl’s parents. They were well off, Nurse Abbotts did not know what it was the father did but he spoke well and drove a big car, and they too found comfort in my mother’s presence. Just a fortnight later the girl’s father showed up at the hospital and offered my mother a job as their housekeeper; a job, he made clear, and a place to live. A home.

‘Penelope, the poor girl’s name was,’ says Nurse Abbotts, and I cannot help but admire her capacity for empathy, that memory which retains individual names over years, decades. ‘The surname… Of course she had no husband, no boyfriend.’ She clucks her tongue, in sympathy rather than disapproval. ‘So hard, for them all.’ She sets down her cup, takes a moment, lost in contemplation of the pain she has witnessed over the years. She comes back to the here and now with a smile of suppressed triumph. ‘Latimer. All three of them, Latimer. I remember, I admit I asked about them. For Marcela’s sake. But they were respectable.
Decent people.’ She nods, satisfied that she acted properly all those years ago. And satisfied that her memory has still not betrayed her.

‘And that was the last I saw of Marcela,’ she says. ‘I thought of her often, prayed for her for years. But I never saw or heard from that dear girl again.’

27

‘SO TELL ME
, Mr Connell.’ Mr Latimer dabs at his mouth fastidiously with a white linen napkin, then folds it shakily back on his lap. He raises his eyebrows, inquisitive rather than interrogative, and picks his knife and fork back up. ‘Why now? After all this passage of time?’ He talks slowly with the ponderous, portentous air of a man who is used to people hanging off his words; a cardigan-wearing academic of some obscure and irrelevant subject. My regard for him is plummeting by the second.

Next to him, his wife gives me a quick encouraging smile but her innate middle-class good manners cannot hide her abiding suspicion. Her daughter, Penny short for Penelope, does not bother hiding her hostility; she is drinking from a wine glass but I can see one eye glaring at me from behind it, the other obscured by her tipping hand. Mr Latimer has not waited for an answer before going back to sawing at his steak, as if to reassure me that this is not the third degree and that he does not expect an answer immediately, our dinner is just as important. The atmosphere around the table is as crisp as the white tablecloth, as fragile as the wine glasses.

‘There was a lot of secrecy,’ I say. ‘I was discouraged.’

‘By?’ Mrs Latimer tries to soften her curt question with a smile but we both know where we stand. I am as welcome in their comfortable lives as a cowboy builder trailing dog shit.

‘My father. I believe that he was ashamed. He was complicit in her… In what happened to her.’

Mr Latimer nods, a slow nod of absolute understanding as if my account tallies with various other similar stories he has heard or experienced. But he has the serene air of a man who has lived an entire life sheltered from such brutal realities. He has soft white hair like a cat’s fur and lines at the corners of his blue eyes as if he is accustomed to smiling and having much to smile about and he has told me that he is a retired auctioneer. I imagine he lives in a large house that sits up a gravel drive behind high hedges. He is merely being polite; he cannot understand a single thing about me.

‘And so what happened to make you seek her out?’ he asks. He puts down his knife and fork, plants his elbows and steeples his fingers, folds them together. His daughter Penny slurps wine loudly, finishes her glass and sets it down clumsily. All three are looking at me and I get the strange feeling that I am an interviewee and that I had better satisfy their questions or this is as far as I will get.

A waiter comes into our small room and hovers; Mr Latimer flicks his fingers at him discreetly, dismissing him with the practised gesture of a man who is used to dealing with underlings. The waiter disappears as noiselessly as he arrived, leaving us alone again in this small panelled room,
a private dining room off the main restaurant. It is in a converted bank and you have to climb wide stone steps to get through its heavy wooden doors, to step echoingly on its black-and-white tiled floors. A woman met me and when I gave the name Latimer showed me to our place of honour, crossing rows and rows of white linen-covered tables under a high domed ceiling, some kind of battery-chic dining, which Manchester somehow seems to believe is exclusive. But the food is not bad, modern British and price-wise falling narrowly the right side of taking the piss; the company, so far, is vinegary and strange to my coarser palate.

‘My father had a heart attack,’ I say, answering Mr Latimer’s question. I will spare these people the details, of my crossing the path of Vincent Halliday, of my meeting with his ex-wife. Already the story of my mother and me is dirty enough. ‘And with it, a change of heart.’

‘Is he on the mend?’ Mrs Latimer asks, her good manners too deeply ingrained to be forgotten, even now.

‘He’s out of danger, yes,’ I say. ‘I thought she had left me. Voluntarily. I never knew that it was not her choice.’

‘And so here you are ready to make everything all right.’ Penny speaks with the lurching imprecision of somebody who is not used to drinking. She sits back in her chair and shakes her head in frustration. She is in her late-fifties with the immaculate, starched blonde nest of hair I associate with country-living, Range Rovers, children at good schools and church on a Sunday morning. Her fingernails are immaculate; I notice them as she sits forward again and reaches for the wine bottle. She could be a politician’s wife, about to disgrace him.

‘I am here to find her,’ I say. ‘That’s all. It’s thirty-seven years too late to make everything all right.’

Mr Latimer apparently likes this answer; he nods his head at his plate as he chews his steak. I am surprised by how spry and alert he is, despite his age. He must be in his eighties, his wife too.

‘You understand,’ he says, ‘that Marcela became very dear to us. Very dear indeed.’

‘I understand,’ I say. ‘But I cannot help that she is my mother.’

Penny blows out her cheeks petulantly as if she is a child who has been told she can’t go to a party. But Mr Latimer points a knife at her with a liver-spotted hand, waves it admonishingly. ‘Penelope. Mr Connell has a right, whatever you may think. He has come this far. We owe it to him to hear him out.’

I’d left Nurse Abbotts savouring the remains of her coffee, sighing happily to herself, lost contentedly in a past that was, apart from perhaps an over-dependence on caffeine, entirely blameless. I headed back for the hotel under a persistent drizzle; I did not have a coat or umbrella and by the time I had found a taxi I was soaked. It was early afternoon but already cars had headlights on, beams reflecting off slick black roads in the grey light as if autumn was giving us a sneak preview of the misery to come, dousing our summery optimism in its pearly gloom. For the second time I looked through Manchester’s phone book, but this time my task was more difficult; while there had been only four Conneelys there were over forty Latimers, and none of
them had the initial P. I had asked for the hotel’s directory and I smiled at the girl at reception as I tore the page out; she raised an eyebrow but did not say anything. I took it upstairs to my hotel room, stretched out on the bed and called the first number. A man answered.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, I’m trying to get in touch with a Penelope Latimer.’

‘Don’t know anyone called Penelope, pal. Who are you?’

‘A friend.’

‘Yeah? Good luck.’ He hung up and I reflected on the suspicion I had heard in his voice. The malicious, sinister caller infiltrating our homes and insinuating himself into our lives is a media bogeyman feared by all; I was going to need to use some finesse. But fear is a useful emotion to exploit, and I am better used than many to intimidation.

‘Hello?’

‘Good evening. My name is DCI Travis, and I’m trying to contact a Penelope Latimer as a matter of some urgency. We believe her identity is being used as part of a money-laundering operation.’

I reached thirty-one of the forty numbers, and drew a blank with each; people were concerned that their identities and bank accounts were at risk, but none admitted to being related to a Penelope Latimer and I believed them. Why would they have any reason to lie? I lay back on my hotel bed and looked at the ceiling, projecting the story Nurse Abbotts had told me on to its blank whiteness. She had described the young woman who lost her baby all those years ago as a ‘girl’, unmarried; a wealthy girl gone off the rails? Anything could have happened since, she might
have married and changed her family name, might have married, divorced, remarried, widowed. Which left me with nothing but a first name, Penelope; not the most common first name, but not nearly enough to track her down. I felt as if I had arrived at a train platform only to see my train pulling away without me; no matter how far I travelled, the spectre of my mother remained out of reach.