It's Now or Never (11 page)

An agitated Lynne shot a look at Nan, who said, ‘Sorry, love, but you knew it would come to this one day.'

Roberta's heart was thudding and her knees were trembling. ‘Will you tell me what this is all about? Is it that you're not my mother?' she asked through stiff lips.

‘Don't be daft! Of course I'm your mother!' cried Lynne, her eyebrows snapping together. ‘I could have had you adopted but I fought against it. You ask Nan!'

A bewildered Roberta looked at her elderly relative. ‘What's she trying to tell me, Nan?'

‘That she wasn't married to your dad when she gave birth to you,' said Nan.

Roberta could not speak for several moments. What was her Nan saying – that she was illegitimate? She needed air and breathed in deeply, watching her mother all the time.

‘There was a war on,' whispered Lynne.

‘But … but you married him afterwards, didn't you? I mean, you're not a Graham like Nan but a Donegan and so am I,' said Roberta.

Tears swam in Lynne's eyes. ‘He … he was killed before we could be married.'

‘But … but you're a widow!'

‘No, I'm not,' said Lynne fiercely. ‘I took your father's name because I thought we both had a right to it.'

Roberta sat down abruptly. Her head was spinning with so many differing thoughts that she felt giddy and sick. None of them spoke for what seemed an age and then the world seemed to steady for Roberta. ‘But you loved him and he loved you?' she asked.

‘Of course!' cried Lynne. ‘But we were both very young! I was only seventeen when you were born and by then Robert had been killed.'

‘Only seventeen,' muttered Roberta. ‘That's only four years older than I am now!'

‘Exactly,' said Lynne. ‘And I wouldn't recommend getting into trouble at that age, love.' She patted her daughter's knee. ‘Although I wouldn't swap you for all the tea in China.'

Roberta blinked back tears and was silent for a long time while her mother and great-grandmother watched her anxiously. Then she took a shuddering breath. ‘What has this Yank to do with us then?' she demanded.

‘Tell her the rest, Lynne, love!' urged Nan.

Lynne flashed her an exasperated look. ‘But we don't know for certain that it's true.'

‘Tell her!' ordered Nan.

‘Bloody hell, Nan! I wish you'd give me a minute to gather my thoughts,' said Lynne, pushing back a hank of auburn hair.

Roberta waited impatiently.

Lynne sighed. ‘Stuart Anderson could have been sent by your grandmother.'

‘My grandmother!'

‘My mother, your grandmother Graham! She threw me out when I told her I was having a baby.'

‘That's horrible!' cried Roberta, her expression fierce. ‘It's a good job you had Nan.'

‘Nan was on her travels, so you were born in a charitable home for unmarried mothers in Cheshire,' said Lynne.

‘So that's what you meant when you spoke about having me adopted?'

Lynne nodded. ‘I wanted to keep you and so did most of the mothers who gave birth to healthy babies who were in there. Though I remember one girl who seemed glad to be rid of her baby. Fortunately for me Nan turned up in the nick of time and so I was able to leave the home, carrying you in my arms.' Lynne eased the lump in her throat. ‘You and Nan helped me get through the trauma of losing Robert,' she said huskily.

Roberta took a deep breath. ‘You really loved him.'

‘I've told you so,' said Lynne, shaking her head at her daughter. ‘Being wartime there were probably thousands of women in the same dilemma. We all had to find different ways of dealing with it.'

‘There's no need for you to feel ashamed, Bobby, love,' said Nan breathlessly. ‘You or your mother! She could have had you adopted as she said but the pair of us found a way around that and we've managed, and although it's been difficult at times, we have no regrets,' she wheezed. ‘You brought a lot of love with you.'

‘I'm … I'm not ashamed,' said Roberta, tears sparkling on her eyelashes. ‘I … I feel proud of the pair of you.' She tilted her chin.

‘No one else need know you're illegitimate,' said Lynne, touching her daughter's knee.

‘But what about the Yank? He's looking for Lynne Graham and her daughter and you seem to think he's connected to your mother,' said Roberta. ‘Obviously he doesn't know you've taken the name Donegan? Did your mother know that my father had been killed?'

‘Oh, yes! I told her but it made no difference. She went on to marry a Yank and sailed off to America! I can't believe she's had a change of heart after all this time,' said Lynne, glancing at Nan. ‘So perhaps we'd be best forgetting all about her and this Stuart Anderson.' She wiped her damp face with the back of her hand. ‘Now let's have some tea.'

‘No, Mum, you can't just leave it like that,' cried Roberta.

‘Yes, I can,' said Lynne, rearing her head. ‘I want nothing to do with my mother. Now I don't want to hear any more about it from you,' she added firmly.

Roberta opened her mouth to protest but then closed it. There was no point in arguing with her mother right now. They'd all had a shock and needed to calm down.

As Roberta helped set the table for the evening meal, her head still buzzed with the events of day. If she had not decided to go to the library straight from school and called in at the coffee bar, she would have been none the wiser about the Yank and her own status. Illegitimate! Her stomach trembled as she imagined the younger Lynne's panic at finding herself
in trouble
.
She could not picture herself in such a situation but guessed if it were to happen, then her mother would not be in a position to reject her. Fancy having your own mother do so, she thought, feeling hurt for Lynne. Roberta thought about how fortunate she was that her mother had wanted her and had been able to keep her and felt sorry for all those mothers and babies who had not been so fortunate.

‘Nick!' called Kenneth Rogers.

The youth lifted his fair head from the books spread out on the table and hesitated before standing up and heading for the top of the stairs. ‘D'you want something, Dad?'

‘Of course I do, son, otherwise I wouldn't be shouting you.'

‘It's just that I'm doing my homework.'

‘Leave it for a moment. I won't keep you long. I just need your help to move these planks of wood that came in this afternoon. A customer could fall over them where they are and injure themselves.'

‘Coming!' shouted Nick, and clattered down the stairs to the shop below.

Kenneth looked relieved as Nick seized hold of the end of one of the smoothly planed planks of pinewood and between them they carried it into the storeroom behind the shop. They repeated the action several times before the man with greying hair eased his back and then sat down on a chair, stifling a yawn. ‘Will you check whether all the doors are bolted top and bottom?' he asked.

‘Sure,' said Nick, thinking he no longer needed a chair to stand on to do the job. He had grown three inches in the past few months and was now taller than Kenneth. The youth was made up about that because his dad had told him that his nickname had been Titch when he was at school and he had been bullied.

There were some big lads at the Liverpool's Boy's Institute where Nick was a pupil and the thought of having to run the gauntlet of passing them in the playground or on the way there and back to school used to fill him with dread. Then he had met Chris who was two years older than him and who started coming into the shop to buy a pound of nails, a length of two by four, or a bag of cement, sand or plaster for his father who was a DIY enthusiast. The youths had struck up a friendship and Nick was no longer as wary of the bigger lads as he used to be and tried to give as good as he got.

Kenneth smiled at Nick as he returned from bolting the doors. ‘Now how about putting the kettle on for a nice cup of tea?' said the man, getting slowly to his feet.

Nick nodded, thinking that his father had aged since his mother, Muriel, had died eighteen months ago. It was a bloody shame, just when life seemed to be going so well for them. She had been so proud when Nick had passed the eleven-plus and found real pleasure in buying his school uniform. He remembered her saying, ‘I can just see you being a doctor or a teacher one day.' He felt that tightness in his throat and chest whenever he thought of her but at least he and his father had both survived their second Christmas without her. Although it would have been better if Uncle Dennis hadn't turned up on the day for the turkey and all the trimmings. But being family meant they had to put up with him, since the Rogers brothers' father had died two years after their mother.

If Muriel had been alive, Dennis wouldn't have got his foot through the door because they had never got on. She had considered her brother-in-law selfish and spoilt and had told him so to his face. In response he'd said that she was one to talk, adding that she lived in cloud cuckoo land. Nick could not understand why he had said that to her because he'd always considered his mother one of the most sensible people he knew. As for his uncle, he loathed him. Even when Nick was a small lad, Dennis had attempted to undermine his confidence. When he had made little gifts of wood for his grandparents or taken the drawings he had done in school to show them, Dennis always found fault with them. When Nick passed the eleven-plus, his uncle had told him not to get above himself and that it had been a fluke him passing the examination.

Nick had tried to ignore him but it was not easy because he also made comments about Nick being double-jointed, calling him a freak. He could only be thankful that his uncle lived in Wales, although for how much longer was a question that kept rearing its head. Recently Kenneth, who was the older brother, had talked about the need to sell the house in Flintshire where Dennis still lived.

Nick sighed as he spooned tea from the wooden caddy he had made for his mother into the fat-bellied brown teapot that Muriel had used every day until the last week of her illness. If only she was still alive. After she had died, Kenneth had been wont to say
At least she didn't suffer too long.
But how long was too long to suffer? Nick wondered, taking two coronation mugs out of the cupboard as he heard Kenneth climbing the stairs.

When his father entered the kitchen, Nick thought, not for the first time, how they did not look a bit alike. He remembered asking his mother whether he took after her side of the family. She had hesitated and then nodded, telling him that she had been blonde when she was a girl but her hair had darkened as she grew older. The fact that her eyes were blue and Nick's brown might be thought unusual with his hair being fair but, she had added, her Uncle Fred who had been killed in the Great War had been just the same.

Then there was Nick being double-jointed. It had to be a throwback to her grandfather who had been an acrobat in the circus. He smiled, remembering how his mother had always loved Bertram Mill's circus pitching the big top in Newsham Park, and the pair of them had always gone together. For weeks afterwards Nick had wanted to be a daring young man on a flying trapeze. He had grown out of that but he was still good at gymnastics.

‘How about a couple of rounds of toast, beans and sausages for supper?' suggested Kenneth, breathing heavily as he sat down.

Nick rested a hand on the well-scrubbed table. ‘That suits me, Dad. I might as well do it now and finish my homework later.'

‘If you're sure you don't mind,' said Kenneth earnestly. ‘I have some paperwork to do.'

As Nick took the frying pan from a cupboard along with a saucepan, he thought how much easier life had been when they had lived in the semi-detached house in West Derby, but after his mother had died, Kenneth had decided to sell the house and move into the rooms over his hardware shop on Prescot Road. He had said it would be more convenient. Nick had not argued, guessing that the real reason was because Kenneth could no longer bear living in the house without Muriel. Sometimes Nick thought it would have been better if they had stayed there because there were so many happy memories tied to that house but his father had seemed unable to see that.

As they sat down to their simple meal, Kenneth said, ‘I was thinking now the snow has gone that we should visit your Uncle Dennis instead of him coming here so often.'

Nick's fair head shot up. ‘Do we have to?'

Kenneth nodded. ‘I have important matters to discuss with him concerning the house and there's a particular piece of furniture that Father left me I want to make sure he hasn't sold.'

Nick searched for an excuse. ‘I've school work to do, Dad. I need to prepare for exams.'

Kenneth pointed his fork at him. ‘No excuses! I want your company. You haven't visited the house since your grandfather's funeral. I want my share of that house. Our Dennis thinks he can go on hogging it but I'm not going to allow it. I'm the eldest and he should listen to me. But does he? Does he, hell!' He paused. ‘But I take your point, we won't go just yet. We'll wait until the Easter school holidays. The traffic will be murder on the bank holiday Monday, so we'll go the following Wednesday afternoon. Is that clear, son?'

‘Yes, it's clear,' muttered Nick, making a sausage butty. ‘Although I still don't see why I have to go with you. He hates me.'

‘You're imagining it.'

Nick knew he wasn't imagining it. ‘He's always poking his nose in my business, too,' he said beneath his breath.

Kenneth stared at him. ‘He's just interested because he's got no children himself.'

Nick did not believe that, and was convinced that his uncle was trying to catch him out doing something so he could complain to Kenneth about it. ‘Why d'you need me?'

‘I need your help to carry that piece of furniture I mentioned.'