Page 54

Penzance

Stephen was down with flu and I had to run the auction tomorrow. It was too late to bring someone else in. I hadn’t done this in years. My stomach was in knots. I would stutter and fail, I was certain. My father calmly looked out at me from a photo.

‘Dad, this isn’t fair. I can’t do this.’ His clock chimed five and I laughed. It was ten to three. I scrolled through the emails that had flooded in after the BBC piece on Sheba and Viv. Nothing that would help, but plenty of good stories about them and their quiet involvement in the community.

‘Ren, there’s someone here who would like a word.’ Marcia stepped aside, and a silver-haired woman with a cane walked into the room.

I stood and came around the desk, pulling out a chair. She smiled, and I shivered. There was something in her smile that was familiar.

Once she’d sat down, I studied her face again, telling myself my eyes were lying.

‘You’re Isabella,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘Tea or coffee?’ Marcia asked.

‘Tea, please,’ Isabella said. ‘Milk, no sugar.’

Marcia disappeared and I sat in my father’s chair, shaking a bit.

‘I’m Ren Barton.’

‘I saw you on the news last night.’ She tucked her cane safely against the arm of the chair.

‘And you are Isabella Kernow, daughter of . . .’

She looked at me but didn’t say anything.

With Rory’s certainty in mind, I said, ‘Katherine and Simon Forster.’

‘Yes.’ She clasped her hands together. ‘It’s strange to acknowledge it.’

‘Have you never told anyone?’

‘Only my late husband, and he said it’s simply something in the past.’ She smiled.

‘He’s right, of course, but there’s a story here and I only have parts of it.’

‘You may have more of it than I.’ Her eyes were clear, and conveyed humour and intelligence.

I had a thousand questions, but I couldn’t rush them. ‘You live in Penzance?’

‘Bryher in the Isles of Scilly. Well, at least for a little while longer.’

‘How wonderful.’

‘It is, but I’m here looking at an easier place to live, since I’m not getting any younger.’ She tapped her cane.

Marcia came in with the tea, then left again.

‘I was shocked to see the portrait and to hear of Sheba and Viv.’

‘Did you not know they’d died?’ I asked.

‘I assumed they had, given their ages. I also assumed they had changed their wills.’

‘You were the beneficiary?’

‘I was, but that was years ago, before I left.’ She played with the silver bangle on her right arm.

‘When exactly was that?’

‘I was headstrong, to say the least, and fell in love at seventeen.’ She had a faraway look on her face. ‘He was nineteen and in a band.’

I had a feeling I knew where this was going.

‘Needless to say, Sheba wasn’t keen, and I said some terrible things.’

I sent her an encouraging look.

‘The young can be very cruel, and I was wanting to hurt her.’ She turned the bangle on her wrist. ‘Then two years later the band wanted to go to Europe.’ She looked at me. ‘I didn’t have a passport.’

Rory came to the door. ‘Oh, sorry, I don’t mean to intrude.’

I stood. ‘Rory, I’d like you to meet Isabella Kernow.’

His eyes opened wide and he held out his hand. ‘I’m Rory Crown.’

‘You’re the dishy professor from the telly.’

I laughed, and he flushed.

I pulled up another chair for him.

‘Isabella,’ I began.

‘Bella Stedman now.’

‘Bella, I think Rory should hear what you have to say, because he’s been working on your mother’s poetry.’

‘My mother’s?’ She frowned, looking between us.

‘Yes, the poems thought to be the work of your father, Simon Forster, are actually Katherine’s.’

She leaned back in her chair. ‘That explains a lot.’ She was quiet for a moment.

‘I found my birth certificate, and I was furious when I discovered that my father was alive and Sheba and Viv had kept this from me.’ She paused.

‘Looking back now, I can see why, but at the time I was young and angry and trapped, or so I thought.’

‘What did you do?’ Rory asked.

She laughed. ‘Like all children, I knew where things were kept, even though I wasn’t supposed to.’ She looked at both of us. ‘So I went to the secret hiding place. First I found their wills, and that was when I discovered that my name wasn’t Isabella Kernow but Isabella Forster.’

‘That must have been . . .’ I struggled to find a word. ‘Unsettling.’

‘Sheba had told me that my parents had both died in the Blitz. I never doubted it. She also said she had adopted me, which I never questioned, and I don’t think anyone else did either.’

‘Do you remember your parents?’ I asked. She had been six when she came to Cornwall, and many of my own strongest early memories were from that time.

‘Vaguely. I remember my mother, but that might be because of the portrait.’

‘The war caused so much destruction,’ Rory said. ‘So many documents lost to bombing, and so many displaced people.’

‘What happened after you found the birth certificate?’ I asked.

‘I took it, stormed out and caught the first train out of Penzance.’ She picked up the mug and turned it in her hands.

‘Foolish. Viv caught me as I was leaving and tried to talk me down. She told me the whole story of my mother and Sheba’s plan to escape my father, but I didn’t want to believe her. Viv was so good, so kind.’

‘When did she arrive?’ Rory asked.

Bella smiled. ‘After the war, in forty-six. She came for a holiday and never left.’ She twisted the bangle on her wrist again.

‘The war years were hard, with me and Sheba muddling our way through.’ She looked up.

‘Viv brought joy with her, and as a family unit we did pretty well until the teenage years.’ She laughed drily.

‘I wasn’t easy.’ She lifted her wrist and showed me the rough-hewn bracelet.

‘Viv made this for me. It was to remind me of love, which has no beginning and no end.’ She dropped her arm to her lap.

‘They were both good women and wanted the best for me. I was their focus – not their art, not anything else.’

‘So you know why you came to Cornwall?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘My mother loved Sheba, and at first I thought that was why I ended up there, but no.’ She took a sip of tea.

‘Viv told me my father was abusive. Sheba wouldn’t even say his name.

’ She rubbed her left knee. ‘He was still alive when I found him. Never had I encountered someone so bitter, so twisted.’

I walked around the desk and kneeled beside her, taking her hand.

‘He told me I couldn’t be the daughter of the whore who had been his wife.

That they had both died in the Blitz.’ She drew a breath.

‘But he knew I hadn’t been in the house when my mother was killed.

I confronted him with the truth. He denied it.

’ Her shoulders dropped. ‘I showed him my birth certificate and he tried to destroy it, saying all I was after was the money.’

‘Oh Bella.’ What that must have felt like, I couldn’t imagine.

‘I called him all sorts of things because it was clear he could at least have looked for me, wanted me. I was his child. Instead he had lied and said I’d been with my mother.’ She closed her eyes and my heart went out to her. That rejection would cut so deeply.

‘The sad thing was, I’d said such unforgivable things to Sheba.’ She turned the bangle once again. ‘I knew that with those words I’d destroyed all the love I’d been given.’

‘They couldn’t have been that bad.’ Memories of my own battles with my mother during my teen years ran through my mind. So much shouting on my part and calmness on hers.

‘I told her I hated her. That she had wrecked my parents’ marriage and that she had been a terrible mother replacement.

’ She drew a breath. ‘I was incredibly broken afterwards and fell into heavy drug use . . . anything to get away from the thoughts in my head.’ She slid the bangle up and down her arm. ‘I was too ashamed to contact her.’

She closed her eyes and her chest rose and fell rapidly. When she opened her eyes, tears pooled in them. ‘Even now I’m ashamed, even after finding love myself and ending up so close, having married a man from Bryher.’

‘Being so near must have been hard,’ Rory said.

‘It was. But I knew from having seen snippets in the papers that they were both working and fine, and I couldn’t disrupt their lives again now that they were living them rather than putting everything on hold for me.

’ She swallowed. ‘Because that was what they’d done.

They were both brilliant artists, but because of me, they didn’t exhibit, and they rarely sold any work.

The risk was too great if they became known.

Questions would have been asked about me. ’

She placed both hands on her knees and clenched them. ‘You see, I couldn’t forgive myself, so how could they forgive me? Being so close was my personal pain, but even so, I somehow missed the reports of their deaths. Probably lost in the chaos when my husband passed.’

Her glance met mine. There were so many emotions playing across her face. I had to do something. Her poor heart.

I stood. ‘Do you want to see the house?’

‘I want to see the painting of my mother,’ she said.

‘Of course. I am so happy to be able to show it to you.’ I looked to Rory and met his gaze. There were tears in his eyes.