‘They will.’
‘Really?’ I turned to assess her. ‘You seem to know a lot about it.’ I hesitated. I needed to ask her. But I was terrified of the answer. What would I do if Neil was right?
I took her hand in mine, her bones fine underneath my fingers. You and she were the only two people I loved in the whole world. ‘Please just tell me the truth. I can’t bear lies. No more lies. But I need to know. Was Neil right? Are you Jean Burdon?’
She looked at me for the longest time, her pupils massive in the fading light, obscuring most of her iris. Just when I thought she wasn’t going to answer, she said, ‘Would you still love me, Rose?’
Would I? I had you to think about. Maybe if I hadn’t just killed a man I might have kicked her out there and then.
‘I need to know the truth.’
Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I didn’t mean to do it,’ she said, in such a small voice that I had to strain to hear her. ‘It was an accident. I was ten years old. My childhood – it wasn’t good, Rose. But I’ve never hurt anyone else. You need to believe me.’
I stared at her. She’d been a child. I couldn’t imagine her hurting anyone now. I was the one who had killed Neil after all. And I was so in love with her I would have believed anything she told me.
We sat up most of that night, talking. She opened up to me for the first time since we’d met. She told me the story of Jean Burdon – the little girl the newspapers had dubbed ‘evil’， of how she was neglected and physically abused by her father, left to roam around the abandoned bombsites of east London. ‘And then I made a friend,’ she said, her face ashen in the moonlight. ‘And I was so happy that I’d found someone who actually cared about me. I wasn’t emotionally intelligent. I didn’t understand about relationships, particularly with other kids. I had this rage inside me …’ She gave a little sob and I squeezed her hand in reassurance. ‘Anyway, when Susan – that was her name – decided she didn’t want to be friends with me any more I saw red. They said I picked up a brick and smacked her over the head with it. But I can’t remember doing that. I think I might have pushed her, though, and she fell and hit her head.’
‘Oh, Daphne.’
‘I went to prison – of course. Well, it wasn’t an adult prison. A secure unit. I was rehabilitated, thankfully by well-adjusted kind adults who taught me the rights and wrongs my own parents never did.’ She pulled the quilt up to her chin and shivered as though remembering.
‘It must have been awful,’ I said.
‘It was less awful than the house I was brought up in.’
I couldn’t even imagine. My own upbringing had been lovely, the only child to two kind, attentive parents.
I let Daphne talk that night about her childhood, her life. How she was given a new identity as Sheila Watts, how she’d had to steal the identity of Daphne Hartall from her friend Alan when she realized that the journalist, Neil Lewisham, had discovered who she really was.
I didn’t tell her my story. Not then. I’d kept it a secret for so many years that to speak it out loud would have felt too much.
And I didn’t want things to change between us. Daphne might feel uncomfortable if she knew my history. I continued to let her believe I was a widow, that my ‘husband’ had died before you were born.
I hadn’t even told her about my last girlfriend.
Audrey and I were together a long time. We didn’t hide our sexuality: there was nobody to hide it from. My parents were dead and she came from a very liberal, cerebral family. Her parents were academics. Even in the 1970s, with free love and the sexual revolution, there were still those who judged us, who thought nothing of telling us of their disapproval.
But when I turned thirty I wanted the one thing Audrey couldn’t give me.