Forgive Me by Lesley Pearse Read Free Book Online

their
normally calm father was so angry told them this was something really serious.
    Sophie broke the silence first. ‘Does
that mean we have to leave here?’
    ‘Of course it doesn’t,’
Ben said, reaching out to pat his sister’s shoulder.
    ‘I’ve worked my socks off for
this house,’ Dad raged, growing flushed in the face. ‘Your mother wanted for
nothing, and never did a day’s work. I even took her kid on and brought her up as
my own. This is how she repays me. I can’t even claim on the life insurance
because she topped herself.’
    Only one line of that bitter tirade really
registered with Eva:
I even took her kid on and brought her up as my own
.
    ‘Are you saying I’m not your
daughter?’ she asked in a shaky voice, hoping against hope he’d only said it
in the heat of the moment.
    ‘Are you stupid along with being
conniving? Of course you bloody well aren’t,’ he said, taking a long swig of
his whiskey. Then, putting the glass down, he glared at her balefully. ‘Anyone
with only three brain cells would’ve worked that out years ago.’
    Suddenly the reason she looked so different
from her brother and sister was clear. It had been commented on byother people, but Mum had said Eva took after her side of the family.
    The enormity of it, and to be told in such a
spiteful way, felled Eva. All she could do was flee, running out of the kitchen into the
courtyard and then on down the drive and out into the road beyond.
    Her mother had gone and now she was just a
worthless stepchild, only there on sufferance.
    She kept on running until she came to
fields. Seeing a farm gate, she climbed over it and slumped down on to the grass behind
the hedge, crying her heart out.
    Earlier, she’d told Sophie they should
forgive their mother. But how could she forgive this? How many times had they looked
through photo albums together? Always Mum had said stuff like, ‘Look at you,
Daddy’s girl,’ when she was in his arms or on his lap. Taking her first few
steps, or on a climbing frame or riding a tricycle, Dad was almost always there with
her. In later pictures, when Ben and then Sophie had arrived, it was still the same.
Maybe she was now too big to be in his arms – the new baby had that place – but they
were happy family pictures, and she looked as right in them as the other two did.
    She had often asked why Sophie and Ben were
taller, darker and thinner than she was. But Mum always said that was how it was in
families sometimes. Perhaps that was true, but by the time she was six or seven she was
old enough to be told she had a different father.
    Eva really didn’t know anything about
a studio. She knew from old photographs that they lived somewhere else before Ben was
born, but Mum had never said where it was, just as she’d never said anything much
about her own childhood, or her parents.
    Eva had asked her about them once. Granny,
Dad’s mum,was ill in hospital, and though Eva was only nine she
sensed Granny was going to die soon by the way Mum and Dad talked. By then she knew most
children had two sets of grandparents, and she asked where her other set were.
    ‘They died before you were
born,’ Mum said. ‘They lived in Cornwall.’
    That was it really. Scanty information
which, if today’s revelations were anything to go by, might not even be the truth.
All she really knew for sure about her mother was that she had gone to art college in
London during the 1960s. There was one of her paintings in the sitting room – a view of
a beach which Mum said was in Cornwall. Perhaps it was close to where she had lived as a
child, but she never said.
    It had been dusk when Eva went into the
field, but now it was pitch dark. She only moved because her teeth were chattering with
the cold; she didn’t want to go home, but she had no money on her. And in just the
sweatshirt and jeans she’d changed into before she cooked the tea, she’d be
frozen stiff by morning. She hoped that Dad would apologize and