Page 113 of Kate and Clara's Curious Cornish Craft Shop
‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ I say, finding my voice now. ‘Really sorry. Poor Maggie.’
Susan looks oddly at me. I don’t blame her – after all she doesn’t know how we knew her mother. We’re just two strangers asking a few peculiar questions.
‘Do you know my mother?’ Susan asks, mirroring my thoughts, ‘because it sounds like you do.’
‘I don’t know her exactly …’ I glance at Jack, maybe I should just be quiet.
‘What Kate means is we’ve heard lots about her. We know she overcame polio in the fifties, and that she was in a wheelchair and then learnt to walk again. She must have been a strong woman, your mother. Believe me, I know how difficult it is to lose the use of your legs.’
Susan nods. ‘Yes, she did indeed do those things, but how do you—’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Jack says quickly. ‘What’s important now is Freddie. You obviously know something about him. Kate said you reacted on the telephone when his name was mentioned?’
‘Yes, I did, and that’s what I was coming to. Because my mother has dementia she doesn’t always make a lot of sense, and she gets lost in her memories of the past quite a bit. But sometimes she can be as sharp as a pin, and you’d think there was nothing wrong with her. It’s those times we cherish now.’
We nod sympathetically and wait for Susan to continue.
‘I’m going to have to tell you some background information so that what I’m going to say will hopefully make sense – is that all right?’
‘Perfectly,’ I say, keen to know as much as we can about Maggie.
‘My grandparents lived in St Felix for many years. My grandfather was an artist and my grandmother ran a little shop there. A few years after they got married they bought the house we’re selling now.’ She smiles. ‘They had every intention of naming the house but my grandmother always called it “the house with the blue door”, and it sort of stuck.’
A warm feeling floods through my body.
‘Sadly, my grandmother, who I never knew, died before I was born from pneumonia contracted during a bout of ’flu, I believe.’
My stomach twists at this news. Poor Clara.
‘But my grandfather continued to live at the house with my mother for many years. She wasn’t his real daughter, but he always cared for her like she was. One day when she was of an age to do so, my mother decided she wanted to trace her real father. I’m sure my grandfather wasn’t too happy about it, but my mother was pretty stubborn, and still is, for that matter,’ Susan smiles. ‘Anyway, all she knew was he was a US serviceman by whom my grandmother had become pregnant at the end of the war when he was stationed near to her home, so you can imagine it wasn’t the easiest of searches trying to find him.’
I glance at Jack. At last we knew Clara’s story. Maggie was the product of a war-time dalliance with an American soldier.
‘So she decided to go to the States to try to find him, which is how I came along. My mother, like my grandmother before her, became pregnant by someone she only knew briefly and never saw again. Our family is good at that.’ She smiles again. ‘It nearly happened to me too, but I’m pleased to say I eventually married the father of my child.’
I smile now. Their family tale was all too familiar to me.
‘Did your mother find her real father eventually?’ I ask.
‘Amazingly, she did. He was married by then, with another family, but they welcomed Mom and then me too into their family.’
‘How lovely,’ I say. ‘So you and Maggie stayed on in America?’
‘Yes, for about ten years. We saw quite a lot of my stepfamily – we spent Thanksgivings and Christmases with them. They were very generous to us, but then my English grandfather became ill, and my mother decided to move back here to take care of him. After all, he’d looked after her when she needed it, and now it was her turn to repay the favour.’
I think about Arty all alone in that large house for so long, and how much it must have meant to him to have Maggie back with him again.
‘So, we moved back here again and we lived in that house for many years. My grandfather Arty passed away eventually, so then it was just Mom and me there until it was suddenly my turn to move on. I was desperate to return to the States again. It was where I felt I’d done a lot of my growing up. I always made regular trips back to the UK to see my mother though, and it was on one of those trips I met my husband-to-be – the father of my daughter Maggie.’
‘You called your daughter after your mother? That’s nice. Must have been a little confusing with two Maggies in the family.’
‘Usually it would be, but my mother became more and more eccentric as she got older. She began only answering to the name Peggy for a while.’
‘Another pet name for Margaret!’ I say, suddenly getting it. ‘That’s why no one in St Felix knew a Maggie, because she called herself Peggy when she was here last. My colleague thought she remembered an eccentric old lady called Peggy living in the house with the blue door. She said she liked to keep herself to herself.’
‘She did indeed. She became something of a recluse in that big old house, but we began to notice that she was becoming forgetful and we were worried about her. My daughter moved down here to Cornwall to be closer to her – she’s an artist too so it was no hardship for her to come down to Cornwall to paint and keep an eye on Mom. She’d been living in London previously. We didn’t want my mother to know she was being watched over so we made it seem as natural as we could.’
Something else occurs to me. ‘Did your daughter spend a lot of time in the house when she was younger?’ I ask.
