“Listen, my mum has asked if you’d like to go over tomorrow. You don’t have to, but as I’m on duty, I just wondered...”
She leaned up on her elbow and said that she’d love to see his parents again.
“Honestly, you don’t have to.”
“I want to. Didn’t you say it was their wedding anniversary? Maybe you could come by later?”
“I love you,” he said, giving her a hug.
Anna arrived at Ken’s parents’ with a large bouquet of flowers, and Mrs. Hudson hurried her into the kitchen. As she put the flowers into a vase, she explained that she’d been baking an anniversary cake and had to finish the icing but didn’t want her husband, Roy, to see it.
“I’m going to get him to clean that car of yours, which will keep him outside. He’s down at the store, getting a nice bottle of wine for dinner and...” The front doorbell rang. “That’s him, never has his keys. I won’t be a minute. Actually, no, you’d better come out, or he’ll want to come in and say hello.”
Roy Hudson was wearing overalls and Wellington boots, ready to wash and polish his own car, which was parked alongside Anna’s Mini. Anna said that he didn’t really need to wash hers.
“I always obey orders, love, and the wife’s keeping me out of the way ’cause she’s probably baking up a cake or something, so you go on back inside.”
He gave her a smile almost identical to Ken’s, which left her with no choice but to return to the kitchen. She watched, fascinated, as Mrs. Hudson prepared the marzipan and wrapped it around the layered sponge cake; then she was shown how to mix the icing and prepare the cones for the decoration.
“I’ll show you how to make little roses. We’ll need the white icing to dry nice and hard so the colors don’t run, and if you’d like to practice, you can use the breadboard.”
Mrs. Hudson was extremely patient and encouraging as Anna managed to make awful clumps of pink icing over the board. After a number of attempts, she managed a rather good small rose with petals.
“That’s ever so good, dear. Now you can put them on the cake.”
“No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t want to ruin it.”
“You won’t. I’ll mix up a blue and a green for the writing, but I’m not putting on how many years we’ve been married, there’s not enough room.” She laughed.
To spend half an afternoon icing a cake and then having toasted cheese sandwiches with Roy and Brenda was a lovely experience. She was asked a lot of questions about her own parents but not, thankfully, about her work. She was so relaxed that she didn’t think about it until she was sitting drinking tea with Brenda, who was surrounded by all the photographs of her foster children.
“Did the parents of the children you cared for pay regular visits?”
“Some did, but to be honest, most of them only made promises. The hard part for me was when they didn’t turn up. I’d get the children all bathed and dressed smartly, and they’d sit at the front window waiting. Time and time again, the promises were broken, and they would be so disappointed, and then we’d have tantrums and tears.”
“Did the parents send birthday cards and gifts?”
Brenda shrugged. “Often when they first came to me, we’d get phone calls and cards, but inevitably, they would peter out. Roy and I would try and make up for it — you know, by having special parties and cakes.”
“What about money?”
“Well, the Social Services obviously paid for us to do the fostering, and they didn’t really like us to take money off the children’s parents. Most were single parents; sometimes if money was sent, we’d put it into a savings account for the child. We’d never touch it ourselves.” Brenda poured herself another cup of tea. “Why do you ask?”
Anna gave a brief outline of a victim’s children being fostered but didn’t go into details about Margaret Potts.
“Were her children abused?” Brenda asked.
“I honestly don’t know; they could have been. It seems, as far as I know, that it was almost a relief for their mother to have them taken away, as her husband was violent to her and a drunkard.”
“We used to get a lot of poor mites that had been half-starved, never mind thrashed, but you know...” Brenda hesitated.
“Go on, please.”
“I always looked on my charges like a garden. It may sound silly, but you can take a run-down, bedraggled garden, and with tender loving care, you can make everything come alive. Now, sometimes, no matter how hard you work, the weeds take over and strangle the nice orderly flower beds. Or you can get a bed of nettles spring up, and they’re the worst — they’re always hard to keep from growing back. We had some, and no matter what we did, we couldn’t stop them stinging and doing the worst damage. I believe the worst kind is when a child has never known affection, has been ignored and never touched or kissed or cuddled. They were the hardest to deal with, because they couldn’t trust being loved.”
“It must have been difficult.”
“It was, but the rewards always made everything worthwhile. I had a little tigress once, she’d bite and kick and was very destructive, and I was run ragged by her, as she also made the other children unsettled. Just when I was wondering if I’d taken on too much, she came into the kitchen. I knew she was behind me, and I was wondering if she was going to sidle up and kick me on the ankles, but she wound her skinny little arms around me and asked if she could call me Mummy.”
Roy appeared in the doorway, looking grubby but minus his Wellington boots. “Oh, she’s not going on about her garden theory, is she?”
Brenda laughed and offered him a cup of tea. “He’s a one to talk. He first started saying that I was out of my mind taking on one, never mind a whole houseful of them, but it was him that went and bought a caravan so we could take the kids to the seaside.”
Roy sat down with his tea as Brenda opened a drawer, taking out one of her photo albums.
“Not the albums, Brenda love, she’s been shown them.”
“I wanted her to see the ones with you on the beach, Roy, with all the children by the caravan.”
Anna crossed to her, smiling and saying, “I want to see the photographs, I really do.”
“I’m going to have a bath and leave you both to it.”
Roy walked out and Brenda sat down, searching through the album, but suddenly gasped, “I’ve got to put the leg of lamb in the oven! Here, dear, you look through them.”
Brenda carried out the tea tray, and Anna sat on the sofa with the albums. There were lots of holiday snaps, with caravan, without caravan, and with various children on a donkey ride. They seemed to be all ages, and what was touching about them all was the joy on their faces. Anna went to replace the album, and stacked in the drawer in no particular order were loose family photographs. She couldn’t resist looking through them, seeing Ken at different ages with his parents and Lizzie, and with a good-looking younger boy whom she presumed was his brother, Robin. He was, as she’d been told, handsome and darker-haired, like his mother, with a fine chiseled face and dark brooding eyes unlike either parents’.
She was about to replace them when she saw a picture of Ken with his arm resting around the shoulders of a tall man of a similar age. They were smiling into the camera. Ken was wearing a tracksuit, while the other man wore what appeared to be some kind of uniform; dark trousers and a jacket with something on the lapels. He was also holding the leash of a full-grown German shepherd.