kids, right? Well, that was me. It’s why I made such a big thing of this fund raiser. Why I’m here.’ Feeling exposed in the way an alcoholic must feel the first time he admitted he had a problem, she said, ‘My real name is Belinda Porter and I was once a street kid.’
She’d never told anyone where she’d come from. Anything about herself. On the contrary, she’d done everything she could to scrub it out of her mind. Not even Ivo knew. He’d had the tidied-up fairy story version of her life: the one with kindly foster parents—who she’d conveniently killed off in a tragic car accident—a business course at the local college—not the straight from school dead-end job in a call centre. Only the lucky break of being drafted in to work the phones on the biggest national fund raising telethon had been true, but then she’d been ‘discovered’ live on air; everyone knew that story.
How could she blame him for a lack of emotional commitment to her when she had kept most of her life hidden from him? A husband deserved more than that.
She swallowed. ‘My mother, my sister, the three of us begged just to live,’ she said. ‘Exactly like the children we’re here to help.’
For a moment no one spoke.
Then Claire said, ‘What happened to her, Belle? Your sister.’
That was it? No shrinking away in horror? Just compassion? Concern…?
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. Nothing bad. Our mother died.’ She shook her head. That was a nightmare she’d spent years trying to erase. ‘Social Services did their best, but looking back it’s obvious that I was the kind of teenage girl who gives decent women nightmares. Our mother was protective, would have fought off a tiger to keep us from harm, from the danger out there, but I’d seen too much, knew too much. I was trouble just waiting to happen. Daisy was still young enough to adapt. And she was so pretty. White-blonde curls, blue eyes. Doll-like, you know? A social worker laid it out for me. It was too late for me but, given a chance, she could have a real family life.’
‘That must have hurt so much.’
She looked up, grateful for Claire’s intuitive understanding of just how painful it had been to be unwanted.
‘It’s odd,’ she said, ‘because I was the one named after a doll. Belinda. Maybe it was some need in her to reach back to a time of innocence, hope.’ She shook her head. ‘It never suited me. I was never that kind of little girl.’
‘You have the blonde hair.’
‘Bless you, Claire,’ she said with a grin, ‘but this particular shade of blonde is courtesy of a Knightsbridge crimper who charges telephone numbers. She pulled on a strand, made a face. He’s going to have a fit when he sees the state of it.’
She reached for the sewing kit. There was no hairdresser here and no wardrobe department to produce a clean, fresh pair of trousers for the morning. If she didn’t stitch up the tear, her thigh would be flapping in the wind.
‘Daisy was different,’ she said, concentrating on threading a needle. ‘I hated her so much for being able to smile at the drop of a hat. Smile so that people would want to mother her, love her.’ Her hands were shaking too much and she gave up on the needle. ‘I hated her so much that I let someone walk away with her, adopt her, turned my back on her. Lost her.’
‘I lost someone, too.’
Claire, suddenly the focus of their attention, gave an awkward little shrug. ‘It must be this place, or maybe it’s just that here life is pared down to the basics. The next marker, the next drink of water, the next meal. Meeting with the people who exist here on the bare essentials.’ She took Belle’s needle, threaded it, began to work on the torn trousers. ‘There are no distractions, none of the day-to-day white noise of life to block out stuff you’d rather not think about and with nothing else to keep it occupied, the mind throws up stuff you’ve put in your memory’s deep storage facility. Not wanted in this life.’
‘Who did you lose, Claire?’ Simone, pale beneath the tan that no amount of sun screen could entirely block in the thin air, almost whispered the words.
‘My husband. Ethan. A decent, hard-working man…’
‘I had no idea you’d been married,’ Belle said.
Claire looked at her ringless hand, flexed her fingers, then with a little shiver said, ‘As far as the world is concerned, it never happened. One messy little marriage discreetly dissolved with a stroke of a lawyer’s pen.’
‘It can’t have been that simple.’
‘Oh, you’d be surprised just how simple money can make things.’ Then, ‘In my defence, I was twenty-one years old and desperate to get away from my father. He isn’t that easy to escape. He paid my husband to disappear and I was weak, I let him.’
‘Twenty-one? You were practically a kid.’
Claire lifted her head, straightened her back. ‘Old enough to have known better. To have been stronger.’ Then, ‘He’s been on my mind a lot lately. Ethan. I guess it’s all part of this.’ Her gesture took in the tent, their surroundings. ‘I work for my father, but as far as the rest of his staff are concerned I’m a joke, a pampered princess with a make-work job whose only concern is the next manicure, the latest pair of designer shoes. I came on this charity ride to shake up that image, to prove, to myself at least, that I’m better than that.’
‘And finding Ethan would help?’ Belle asked. ‘He did take the money and run,’ she pointed out.
‘Why wouldn’t he? I didn’t do anything, say anything to stop him.’ She shook her head. ‘It would undermine a man’s confidence, something like that, don’t you think? I need to find him, make sure that he’s all right.’ She swallowed. ‘More than that. I need him to forgive me. If he can find it in his heart to do that, then maybe I’ll be able to forgive myself.’
Simone, who’d been increasingly quiet, covered her mouth with her hand to stifle a moan. ‘Forgive yourself? Who will forgive me?’ As Claire, all concern, reached out to her, took her hand, a sob escaped her and then it all came pouring out of her, like a breached dam. A story so terrible that it made Belle’s own loss seem almost bearable.
For a heartbeat, after she’d finished her story, there was total silence as Simone waited, her eyes anticipating horrified rejection. As one, Belle and Claire put their arms around her, held her.
‘I can’t believe I told you that,’ she said finally, when she could speak. ‘I can’t believe you still want to know me.’
‘I can’t believe you’ve kept it bottled up for so long,’ Claire said tenderly.
‘Some secrets are so bad that it takes something special for us to be able to find the words,’ Belle said quietly. ‘It seems that each of us needs to walk back a way, make our peace with the past.’
‘This journey we’re on isn’t going to be over when we fall into a hot bath, crawl between clean sheets, is it?’ Claire whispered. ‘This has just been the beginning.’
‘The easy bit.’ Belle swallowed, feeling a little as if she’d just stepped off the edge of a precipice.
‘But at least we won’t be alone. We’ll have each other.’
‘Will
