Chapter 11 The Red Suitcase
‘Don’t be put off by the handwriting,’ I said to Kyle, sipping my cappuccino. I’d given him Diana’s memoir in an envelope and he slid the pages out to glance at them.
‘I’ll do my best,’ he said, frowning. ‘Listen…’ He paused. ‘Perhaps…’
‘Perhaps what?’ I encouraged.
‘Look,’ he said in a rush, ‘are you free tonight? I’ll have the chat with Julia, then zip through this and we can talk about it over dinner.’
Dinner. It was my turn to hesitate. I wanted to accept, but I remembered what Julia had said about Kyle liking me and dinner felt intimate.
Perhaps this was silly. Still, something held me back.
A sort of fear of going forward. I could use Dad as an excuse – he would have to have supper on his own, though I knew he’d tell me to go out and enjoy myself. I could feel Kyle’s eyes on me.
‘Have I said the wrong thing? We can go out for a meal, if you like, but I propose we stay in. I’m not a bad cook, you know, and it might be easier to discuss things than in a restaurant.’
‘Stay in, then,’ I said, overcoming my fear. ‘If you’re sure. I don’t want to…’
‘I’m sure.’ His eyes were warm and friendly and I felt any last resistance crumble. ‘Come via the back gate – I’ll leave it unlocked.’
And so it was agreed.
Later, when I let myself into Dad’s cottage, his usual chair was empty.
He wasn’t anywhere downstairs. I stood in the hall and called out, then heard a shuffling noise upstairs.
I went up to see and stared upwards in alarm.
My father had pulled the loft ladder down and, leaving his crutches against the wall of the landing, had somehow climbed up it.
I could just see his dimly lit figure through the open hatch, moving around.
‘Dad!’ I called up sharply. I was furious. ‘What on earth are you doing?’
His face appeared, framed in the square hole, and he was grinning like a naughty schoolboy. ‘Those new painkillers are good. And you’re back just in time. Come up and take this case from me.’
I sighed crossly, but grasped the safety rail and began to climb.
Fifteen tense minutes later we were both safely seated at the kitchen table with a child’s red suitcase between us. ‘I suddenly remembered this was up there,’ Dad explained as he wiped the dust off the case with a cloth.
‘You might have waited till I got home,’ I said, still upset, but he wasn’t listening.
With some difficulty he managed to spring the catches on the case. It opened with a creak and a scent of dried flowers wafted out. We both peered doubtfully at the mess of papers inside.
I picked up a black and white photograph from the top.
I stared at it and my heart quickened. It was of a smiling couple in their best clothes standing outside a church.
The woman held a small baby wrapped in a white knitted shawl.
I knew the couple’s faces. I’d seen them in the pictures in Mum’s project and in the ones of the brewery in the museum.
I turned the photo over and read the pencilled words, ‘Susan’s christening, 9th April 1938.
’ Susan, my gran, with her parents, Eric and Betty.
I explained to Dad what I’d read in Margaret Jary’s book about the woman she’d worked with at the brewery.
‘It was Betty. She must have left her job suddenly because she was having a baby! A happy ending,’ I said, laying the photo on the table.
He watched me sift through the contents of the box.
I felt I was getting close to something; I just didn’t know exactly what.
I picked out other photographs and studied them.
Gran as a dark-haired toddler, sitting on a tricycle.
One of her playing on a beach aged five or six, another as a gap-toothed schoolgirl with a gas-mask case strapped over her blazer.
Here, she was a teenager sitting on a farm gate.
Lovely ones of her wedding to Grandad, she radiant in a knee-length white dress.
Beneath a pile of old birthday cards, letters from a French penfriend, news clippings of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, postcards, a little autograph book, a knitting pattern, was a stiff cream envelope, slit open at the top. It was addressed to a ‘Rosalie’. I frowned.
‘Who’s Rosalie?’ I asked Dad, but he shook his head.
I opened the letter and unfolded it. There were two sheets covered in handwriting, some of it clear, some of it blotched and scrawled as though the writer had lost heart.
‘My darling Rosalie,’ it began. I glanced at the address at the top printed in shiny black type and drew a sharp breath.
Farthington House! Why had Gran got a letter addressed to a ‘Rosalie’ and sent from Farthington House?
Beside me, I was dimly aware of Dad reaching for his crutches, but I was too caught up in the mystery to wonder what he was doing.
I turned to the final page of the letter and saw it was signed, ‘Your loving mother’.
While that didn’t help me much, my mind was starting to make connections. Rosalie, Rose, the bluebird pendant…
‘Dad?’ I said, but Dad was stumping off into the hall and seemed not to hear me. Oh well. I turned to the beginning of the letter and began to read.
Darling Rosalie,
This is the most difficult thing I’ve ever written.
I don’t have much time. They’re coming to take you from me today.
You’re only a week old, but I want you to know that I loved you from the first moment the nurse laid me in your arms. If I could keep you I would, but I can’t.
It’s too hard. I’m only seventeen and I fell in love with someone I shouldn’t have done and he can’t marry me because he’s married already.
They say it’s for the best and they’ve found a good home for you.
Your new parents desperately want a baby.
They will love you and look after you. You won’t remember me, my darling.
The pain is all mine. I will never forget you and will love you always.
I don’t know if you’ll ever see this letter, but I’m going to ask them to give it to your new mother, whoever she is, in case she lets you read it when you’re old enough.
I won’t blame her if she doesn’t. I’ve had this explained to me.
One other thing. I’m giving you this special pendant.
Your father gave it to me as a sign of his love so I’m passing it on to you.
He says bluebirds mean happiness and that I’ve made him happy.
May it bring you happiness, too. I hope you have a marvellous life and that if you ever read this, you’ll forgive me.
Your loving mother.
I sat stunned, then read the letter again, wringing the meaning from it.
Baby Rosalie’s mother had not supplied her own name, nor, I saw, had she dated the letter – perhaps she was too exhausted and overwhelmed to attend to such details.
The mention of the bluebird pendant and the reference to the circumstances of Rosalie’s birth, however, made things crystal clear.
Rosalie was Bird’s baby and Bird had named her.
My gran, who’d worn the pendant, was a Susan, but the name on her marriage certificate had been Rose-something. Rosalie, it had to be! Everything suddenly made sense. Gran’s real mother had been Bird! And her father the artist Thomas Fuller!
Desperate for further clues, I put the letter aside and turned to the remaining items in the case: several dried roses, a cinema flyer with the film An Affair to Remember circled in pencil, several photographs of my mum.
And at the very bottom, a long, thin brown envelope, dusty and worn.
I lifted the flap and withdrew a small, folded document. It was Gran’s birth certificate.
‘Susan Rosalie,’ it read, then gave my great-grandparents’ names: Eric and Betty Hayes, 15th March 1938. My eyes widened in disbelief. If Bird was Gran’s real mother, then how could it not say on a birth certificate, a legal document? But here was the name, Rosalie.
‘Dad?’ I took up the letter and the birth certificate and found him sitting in his chair by the fire.
‘I thought I’d give you some space,’ he told me.
After he’d read the letter, he looked up with a dazed expression.
‘Did Mum know her mum was adopted?’ I asked heavily.
He frowned and shook his head. ‘She never mentioned it.’
‘I wonder when Gran found out and how.’ Neither of us knew the answer to that question.
We talked for some time, Dad and I, trying to work out all the links. At one point he asked me how I felt about the revelation and I said I didn’t know. I hadn’t taken it all in. ‘I need to speak to Kyle about it,’ I concluded.
It was then I remembered I was seeing Kyle for dinner and hastily explained. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I can fix your meal before I go.’
Dad grinned at me. ‘Why should I mind?’ he said. ‘I like the idea of you having dinner with a nice young man. Bring him here sometime, I’d love to meet him.’
‘Dad!’ I warned sternly. ‘We’ll just be talking business.’ Something occurred to me that should have clicked earlier and for a moment rocked me. ‘I suppose he’s family, isn’t he?’ I tried to calculate, but Dad got there first.
‘From what you’ve told me I’d say fourth cousins.’
‘Kyle and I are fourth cousins?’ Family, certainly, if pretty distant, but I liked the idea of a connection to Kyle. Though I wasn’t sure about being related to the other Rutherfurds.