Chapter Twenty-Seven
Samuel placed a twiddly side table between the two women, then set down two cups of tea and a plate of biscuits. ‘He doesn’t do this for everyone,’ Frances remarked. ‘Likes to remind me he’s a nurse, not a waiter, so he must approve of you.’
‘Ten minutes maximum,’ Samuel warned. ‘Then it’s time for a nap.’
‘What do you want to know?’ Frances asked.
‘About the affair? Whether my mother Elsbeth knew. But most of all, whether my father told you anything about my birth story.’
‘Quite the wish list.’ Frances took a sip of tea, then set the cup down with care.
‘Well, Edwin and I first met properly in the British Museum in the Seventies. I was walking through the East Asian ceramics gallery and, at the time, it felt like fate. But now I know there was no element of chance about it: he’d been waiting for me, or someone like me, to come along for quite a while.
‘We’d overlapped briefly at Oxford, but he didn’t make much of an impression.
And then he left early, as did your mother, Elsbeth.
She and I weren’t friends, but I’d heard of her – this exceptional young woman who had thrown away her education, got married and run off to some remote corner of Cornwall. ’
‘So you recognised him, when you met again?’ Evelyn prompted.
‘Indeed. Looking very dapper, briefcase in hand.’ Frances gave a wry smile. ‘At first, Edwin and I kept things professional. Our first conversation was about methods of dating ancient lacquerware.’
‘Maybe he was in London for a meeting,’ Evelyn said, clinging on to the things she’d been told. ‘He liked to keep up to date with the latest research: visiting galleries, archivists and so on.’
Frances sighed. ‘My dear, your father was a hobbyist, at best. He was a failed undergraduate, sent down with a basic knowledge of history and archaeology – barely enough to hold his own in dinner party chit-chat. Put him among true experts and he was lost.’ She shook her head.
‘Your mother was more talented, but for whatever reason, opted to keep that hidden.’
‘But all his books, his collections – it was his whole world. You must be wrong. He was writing a book . . .’
Frances had a faraway look in her eyes. ‘I’ve often wondered if that’s what motivated his forays into the museum – his lack of knowledge rather than any great passion.
He was a fraud, compensating for his ignorance.
Being more generous, he was a magpie, briefly obsessed with whatever caught his eye until he spotted the next bright, shiny object. ’
Evelyn pictured her father’s study: framed pressed flowers hanging on the walls, cabinets full of botanical samples and shelves lined with leather-bound books.
She herself had been given the job of proofreading his great work, pages upon pages of tightly typed words that had made her sleepy with boredom, but she assumed that was due to her own lack of expertise.
But Coastal Grasses, Mosses and Ferns of South Cornwall had never found a publisher.
‘Well, you must have liked him well enough,’ she said sharply. ‘You had an affair with him – and for a long time.’
‘Such a tawdry word, but I suppose if the cap fits.’ Frances sighed.
‘Yes, it was a long-drawn-out thing, but intermittent. He’d be around for a while and then disappear for a few years.
Then, just when I’d given up hope, he’d reappear, telling me he’d been on a top-secret field trip to Morocco, or seconded to a university library in Washington. He was very convincing.’
Evelyn remembered the stories that she had accepted as the truth. ‘He told me he had to leave Oxford because he was ahead of his time. The dons trumped up some case against him, because he outsmarted them in every lecture.’
‘Is that so?’ Frances said. ‘I heard a different version, that he was done for plagiarism. But the odd thing was, Edwin didn’t leave Oxford.
He stayed on in digs in the city, strode around with books under his arm like he was still one of us.
It seemed to impress Elsbeth and off they went, to a house he’d found in Cornwall. ’
‘He always said they didn’t need pieces of paper to confirm their intelligence.’
‘Yes, that sounds like Edwin.’ Frances gave a rueful smile.
‘But I think he did need confirmation – all the time. He was horribly insecure. And that was why he decided to charm me. He explained that he and Elsbeth had a child, but now she was at school, he was free to return to academia. He wanted to pick my brains about current research so he could perform well when he got an interview.’
Evelyn sat forward. ‘What did he tell you about me? Did he say where I came from?’
‘He didn’t say much. Just that he and Elsbeth had been approached to adopt a foundling. Being good people, they agreed it was the right thing to do.’
‘Did he say who my mother was?’
‘Oh, Evelyn, to be honest, it didn’t interest me. And then, as Edwin and I became closer, I wasn’t minded to ask. It would have been rubbing salt in my own wounds. Besides, Edwin also preferred to keep things separate. He became very adept at that over the years.’
It was then that a new thought slid in, cold as ice, and Evelyn forced herself to ask, ‘Do you think he had another girlfriend all along, before he got married? That way, Edwin might still have been my father, but with another woman?’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me if he had other women on the go over the years.’ Frances reached for her teacup and drained it. ‘But that he had a baby with one? I doubt that very much.’
Evelyn remained silent.
‘Later, we tried, you see, Edwin and I, because I so wanted a child. But it never happened. I assumed it was me, but when I got myself checked out there was no problem. Privately, I think he was firing blanks. I take it you don’t have any siblings?’
Evelyn shook her head. This felt unnecessarily vindictive – was Frances just throwing her off the scent? ‘If all you’re saying is true, why was my father so keen for me to live with you?’
‘I have no idea. At the time, I said, “Edwin, isn’t it a bit late for us to be playing mummies and daddies?” and he laughed and said never mind all that – he had big plans for Evelyn Silver.’
‘Big plans?’
‘Oh yes. He’d scraped all he could from me by then, so your traineeship was perfect. You were rotated through all the departments, weren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ Evelyn didn’t see where this was going.
‘Let me guess, he was so proud of your progress, he’d come and visit you at lunchtime.’
‘He did. He’d get the early train and come straight to the museum.’
Frances put a gnarled finger to her chin. ‘And, let me guess, during those lunches your father often developed a raging thirst or a deep desire for a ham sandwich and he’d dispatch you to the canteen.’
‘Well, I was hardly going to let him starve.’
Evelyn had loved those visits, the admiration in her father’s eyes as she’d talked about an interesting fact she’d learned about ancient Egyptian embalming techniques or Chinese glazes.
‘My dear, I’m not blaming you. It was a long time before I realised what he was up to.’
‘Up to?’
‘When you trotted off to the canteen – which was a good twenty-minute round trip – I dare say you left him alone at the cataloguing desk with the trays of recent acquisitions.’
‘He was my father. And he was an expert, practically one of us,’ Evelyn protested.
‘Except he wasn’t. But he was smart enough to know that if something disappeared from the acquisitions tray, there was little record of it ever existing. Boxes of, say, “ceramics, 14th century” were logged, but individual items had not yet been catalogued.’
‘No, you’re wrong. My father was a good man,’ Evelyn stumbled.
‘Is that so?’ Frances said in a low voice that chilled Evelyn to her core.
Then, as if by some invisible cue, Samuel appeared with a blanket that he tucked around Frances. ‘I’ll show you out,’ he said.
Frances looked up with tired, watery eyes.
‘I wish I’d been nicer to you back then – more welcoming.
But it was a difficult time for me professionally.
I’d let Edwin get greedy. My supervisor had his suspicions and there was talk of an investigation.
But then came the big hoo-ha with the Egyptian department breakages – which you know all about. ’
Evelyn felt a flood of shame.
‘Not great for you, but personally I was glad because it took the heat off me. Suddenly, every department was in a tailspin about display protocols. And of course, with you leaving, Edwin went to ground. There were no more disappearances and the museum was happy to sweep that troubling episode under the carpet. Except my reputation never recovered. For all my hard work, a cloud of suspicion hung over me until the day I retired. Now, I have nothing but disdain for the lot of them.’
As Samuel escorted Evelyn down in the lift, she stared ahead and asked, ‘Cancer?’
He nodded.
‘How long does she have?’
‘Weeks rather than months,’ he replied.
Evelyn wrote her phone number on a paper napkin she found in her bag. ‘I doubt she’ll want to talk to me again, but just in case,’ she said.
She couldn’t face the noise and crowds of the Tube, so Evelyn decided to walk back to Paddington station.
The cold air came as a relief and she steadily put one foot in front of the other, barely aware of her surroundings.
At a pedestrian crossing in Marylebone, she heard the blare of a car horn and a man put out his arm to stop her from walking into the oncoming traffic.
She’d gone to London in search of a mother, but suffered another loss: Edwin Silver was not the father she thought he was.
If Frances was to be believed, he was a con man who had used Frances and then secured Evelyn’s traineeship so he could continue plundering the museum.
She blinked back tears as this betrayal sank in.
None of it made sense, though, because everyone knew Edwin Silver was a decent man.
And if he’d sold these stolen pieces, where had all the money gone?
Certainly neither her mother nor Evelyn had seen any of it and hers had been a childhood of hand-me-downs and no holidays.
On board the train back to Cornwall, she averted her eyes from the dark windows that reflected back her own tired face, with its slightly too large nose, heavy eyebrows and long chin.
She’d always wondered who she’d inherited these features from and, this morning, she’d hoped she was close to finding the answer.
But now she was travelling home more confused than ever.
Three hours into the journey, she purchased a limp cheese and pickle sandwich and sent a message to Sariah:
Hope your day better than mine. Went to London, but was a wild goose chase.
Sariah swiftly replied: Sorry, that’s hard. Call if you need a chat S x
It was kind of her, but Evelyn was all talked out. She was about to put her phone away when a new message appeared, from an Unknown Number.
Frances here. Samuel has bought me a diddy little phone so I can send texts. I remembered two things. He said your birth mother was young. And I feel sure he mentioned the name Agnes. A local might know more? Good luck.