Inwardly I cringed at how often I’d raged at Maud, how ungrateful I’d been and, most of all… the look on her face when I’d told her what her husband had done.
“Eva, I lied and lied, tying myself into knots. Maybe it was the wrong thing to do, but anything was better than you seeing your mother like that, like she still is. Or worse…”
He fell silent abruptly, caught himself from saying something he’d regret.
“Dad?”
“I loved her, you know that? Still do.”
“You should have told me. I think we’d have been all right. Better than you leaving me with him, anyway. And those nightmares, the terrors, they never went away. I had no one to talk to, no one to help me. No one.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’ve handled the whole thing badly. But—”
“I could have coped. You have no idea what I already cope with, what visions I have and have had ever since that funeral. Lenka comes into my dreams and relates her life in explicit detail.”
Now I had his full attention.
“Notice I didn’t even flinch when you mentioned castration? That I knew all about satanic rituals and demon summoning? How do you think I know all this? The only way I could possibly know is because I’ve been drip-fed a legacy of occult information for the last eight years. It’s in the family, and there’s no escaping it.”
He frowned. “It’s all mind-bending rubbish, Eva. I can only think that somehow you saw those books and that’s how you know all this stuff. Listen, you were a highly disturbed little girl. I had to separate you from your mother, who was absolutely out of her tree, and I don’t want you going the same way. It stops here and now, do you hear me? It stops.”
“No. I never saw those books. Anyway, I’m sixteen now and I need to see her, to talk—”
“No!”
“Nothing will frighten me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“This will,” he said quietly.
“No, it won’t. I can probably even take her madness from her. I can tell her what I know and that it is real not crazy. I can make her better, I know I can – explain the whole thing. At least let me try.”
“Eva, no. I’ve said no, and I meant it. Your mother’s in a very bad way. She has lucid moments, but you really cannot see her.”
I jumped up and yelled, “You’re blocking me. I need to see her – she’s my mother, for God’s sake!”
He grabbed my wrist and held it fast. “Eva, I know what my dad’s done is bad, really bad. It makes me want to go and kill him. I’d give my right arm not to have left you longer than the few weeks we planned, but you have to believe me now, on this one thing, there really are worse things—”
“Worse than rape, incest, abuse—?”
“Yes, far, far worse.”
I shook my head, pulling free of his grip. “You have no idea who I am or what I come from—”
“Eva…” He wiped his hand up and down his face as if washing himself of the filth. “There are no words. You must never know what her family, your family, did. No one can. Believe me, the knowledge would send you insane. You’d never be the same again.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
In the end, we struck a deal, and I stayed over for a couple of nights while he found me alternative accommodation. Dad was convinced Earl would be on the rampage, and it wouldn’t be a great idea if he found me. And like he said, he couldn’t be there all the time to act as a bodyguard; he had to go to work. I could hardly tell him there wasn’t much chance of Earl Hart even being able to walk let alone throw his weight around, so I sat back and let him make the calls.
Through a friend of a friend, it wasn’t long before he got wind of a room in a house with a family who needed extra income, so off we went to look. It was a bedroom on the top floor of a large Victorian house in north Leeds. Most of those large stone-built mansions with long, shrub-lined driveways had been converted into flats and offices long ago, many acquired by the National Health Service for nurses’ homes or outpatient facilities. But one or two were private.
The couple was professional, he a dentist and she a social worker, but clearly they were working all hours and the house needed renovating. She looked harassed, kept pushing her hair back off her face – bit of a drama queen, I thought, but nice. A good person. Dad settled on a monthly rent and paid the deposit, unaware I had a hell of a lot more cash than he did. I could hardly tell him that one either, but every time I thought about it, a smile twitched into a grin – Earl had to have discovered his missing stash!
“She’s looking for a job,” he told the woman, Helen, “so if you hear of anything?”
She nodded straight away. They were desperate for care assistants at one of the nursing homes she frequented. I started work there less than a week later. Lying came easily to me, and I now realised where that came from.
“Aye, she’s eighteen,” Dad told Helen, without even pausing for breath. If you looked carefully, you could see the heightened defensiveness in the tightening of his facial muscles, but you’d have to know to see them. Anyway, what was so wrong with a white lie that helped people? Helen was glad of both the rent money and the young female lodger who would double up as a babysitter, and the nursing home sister practically dragged me inside. Nothing was checked in the way of references. All she did was ask a few questions and take my dad’s word on date of birth. That was it.
After he’d helped me settle into the flat – which was, thankfully, fully furnished – we went out for a bite to eat. He seemed pleased, the downtrodden air about him lifting a little.
“Love, can you not let this drop about visiting your mother? You need to have a life, forget about all this, it will only upset you and—”
“I’m not kidding, Dad. I’ve told you what I’ll do if you won’t let me see her!”
He sighed, gazing out of the café at passersby. The afternoon was bright with sunshine. It was days like those when it was hard to believe in darkness, cruelty, violence and madness. Radios blared out of open-top cars, and cherry blossom fluttered in warm confetti breezes.
He was weighing up the options, you could see. Was it worth the risk? Would his daughter really report his father to the police? What about the repercussions and, of course, his own part in this? What would come out about his wife? The whole hideous family secret would spread across the estate in a sweep of rapacious gossip. It had happened to others – houses daubed in paint, bricks through windows, catcalls of ‘Sickos!’ and ‘Perverts!’ He had a part-time job as a security guard with a small family firm that wouldn’t want trouble. It wasn’t much, but it paid the bills and meant he could see Mum every day.
“If I take you, you’ve got to promise you won’t try to go again on your own. You only visit her with me, okay?”
I could see her; the rest was detail! “I promise.”
So he took me. Not that day, he had to work a night shift, but he’d come back the following week.
“If you don’t, I’ll track her down myself. Now I’m here in Leeds, I can go through the care homes one by one.”
“Don’t do that, Eva. Tell you what, I’ll ring them tonight to let them know we’re coming together, that you’re only sixteen and I’m bringing you for the first time next week.”
He was going to make sure Mum was sedated, wasn’t he? Tip them off so she wouldn’t make a scene or say anything. But it was a start.