“So what did you do?” he asks, and I feel tired as he asks the question, tired and daunted as I did then.
“I went back to see Hattie. I didn’t think she’d have anything to say that would help, but I had to try something.”
I was grasping at straws, and I knew that, but I had to keep grasping. The only thing that might help was the identity of the father of Hattie’s baby, but I didn’t hold out much hope.
When I rang Hattie’s doorbell, a pretty woman in her thirties, whom I guessed to be Georgina, answered the door, holding a child’s book in one hand, lipstick in the other.
“You must be Beatrice, come in. I’m a little behind; I promised Hattie I’d be out of here by eight at the latest.”
Hattie came into the hallway behind her. Georgina turned to her. “Would you mind reading the children the cow story? I’ll get Beatrice a drink.”
Hattie left us to go upstairs. I sensed that this had been engineered by Georgina, though she seemed genuinely friendly. “Percy and the Cow is the shortest, start to finish in six minutes, including engine noises and animal sounds, so she should be down soon.” She opened a bottle of wine and handed me a glass. “Don’t upset her, will you? She’s been through so much. Has hardly eaten since it happened. Try to… be kind to her.”
I nodded, liking her for her concern. A car hooted outside and Georgina called up the stairs before she left. “There’s an open pinot grigio, Hatts, so dig in.” Hattie called down her thanks. They seemed more like flatmates than a boss and a nanny both in their thirties.
Hattie came down from settling the children and we went into the sitting room. She sat on the sofa, tucking her legs under her, glass of wine in her hand, treating the place as home, rather than as a live-in domestic helper.
“Georgina seems very nice…?” I asked.
“Yes, she is. When I told her about the baby, she offered to pay my airfare home and to give me two months’ wages on top. They can’t afford that; they both work full-time and they can only just about manage my wages as it is.”
So Georgina wasn’t the stereotypical Filipina-nanny employer, just as Hattie didn’t live in the broom cupboard. I ran through my, by now, standard questions. Did she know if you were afraid of anyone? Did she know anyone who may have given you drugs? Any reason why you may have been killed (bracing myself for the look that I usually got at this point)? Hattie could give me no answers. Like your other friends, she hadn’t seen you after you’d had Xavier. I was now scraping the bottom of my barrel of questions, not really thinking that I’d get very far.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone the name of your baby’s father?”
She hesitated and I thought she looked ashamed.
“Who is he, Hattie?”
“My husband.”
She was silent, letting me have a stab at working it out. “You took the job pregnant?”
“I thought no one would employ me if they knew. When it became clear, I pretended that the baby was due later than he was. I’d rather Georgina thought I had loose sexual morals than that I lied to her.” I must have looked bemused. “She trusted me to be her friend.”
For a moment I felt excluded from the threads of friendships that bind women together and which I’ve never felt I needed because I’d always had you.
“Did you tell Tess about your baby?” I asked.
“Yes. Hers wasn’t due for another few weeks. She cried when I told her, on my behalf, and I was angry with her. She gave me emotions I didn’t have.”
Did you realize that she was angry with you? She was the only person I’d spoken to who’d had any criticism of you; who you had misunderstood.
“The truth is, I was relieved,” she said. Her tone was one of challenge, daring me to be shocked.
“I understand that,” I replied. “You have other children at home that you need to look after. A baby would mean losing your job, however understanding your employers are, and you wouldn’t be able to send money home to them.” I looked at her and saw I was still offtrack. “Or couldn’t you bear to leave another child behind while you came to the UK to work?” She met my eye, a tacit confirmation.
Why could I understand Hattie when you could not? Because I understand shame, and you’ve never experienced it. Hattie stood up. “Is there anything else you’d like to know?” She wanted me gone.
“Yes, do you know who gave you the injection? The one with the gene?”
“No.”
“What about the doctor who delivered your baby?”
“It was a caesarean.”
“But surely you still saw him or her?”
“No. He wore a mask. When I had the injection. When I had the operation. All the time in a mask. In the Philippines there’s nothing like that. No one’s bothered that much about hygiene, but over here…”
As she spoke, I saw those four nightmarish canvases you painted, the woman screaming and the masked figure over her. They weren’t a record of a drug-induced hallucination but what actually happened to you.
“Do you have your hospital notes, Hattie?”
“No.”
“They got lost?”
She seemed surprised that I would know.
I drain my cup of coffee and don’t know if it’s the caffeine hit or the memory of those paintings that makes a shudder run through me, spilling some of the coffee on the table. Mr. Wright looks at me, with concern. “Shall we end it there?” he asks.
“Yes, if that’s okay.”
We go out into reception together. Mr. Wright sees the bunch of daffodils on his secretary’s desk and stops. I see her tensing. He turns to me, eyes reddening.
“I really like what Tess told you about the gene for yellow in a daffodil saving children’s sight.”
“Me too.”
Detective Sergeant Finborough is waiting for me in Carluccio’s, near the CPS building. He phoned me yesterday and asked if we could meet. I’m not sure whether it’s allowed, but I agreed. I know he won’t be here for his own sake, no pleas to buff up the truth of what happened so he reflects better in it.
I go up to him and we hesitate a moment, as if we may kiss on the cheek as friends rather than as—what? What are we to each other? He was the person who told me it was you they’d found, you in the toilets building. He was the man who’d taken my hand and looked me in the eye and destroyed who I was up until that moment. Our relationship isn’t cocktail-style pecking on the cheek, nor is it simply that of policeman to relative of a victim. I take his hand and hold it as he once held mine; this time it’s my hand that’s the warmer.
“I wanted to say sorry, Beatrice.”
I am about to reply when a waitress pushes between us, tray held aloft, a pencil stuck businesslike into her ponytail. I think that we should be somewhere like a church—a quiet, serious place—where the big things are talked about in whispers, not shouted above the clatter of crockery and chitchat.
We sit down at a table and I think we both find it awkwardly intimate. I break the silence. “How is PC Vernon?”
“She’s been promoted,” he replies. “She’s working for the domestic violence unit now.”
“Good for her.”
He smiles at me, and ice broken now, he takes the plunge into a deeper conversation. “You were right all along. I should have listened to you and believed you.”
I used to fantasize about hearing exactly that kind of a sentence and wish I could whisper to my earlier self that one day a policeman would be telling me that.
“At least you had a query,” I say. “And acted on it.”
“Much too late. You should never have been put in jeopardy like that.”