‘You put it very harshly. It wasn’t quite like that, Cathy – at least give me a chance to explain.’ He looked down at her, his eyes pleading. They had been so close, closer than most fathers and daughters. How often had Cathy shared his campaign trail, sitting up with him in smoky rooms discussing tactics, knocking on doors, shaking hands in crowded campaign halls, beside him all the way. She had always been Daddy’s girl. He couldn’t believe he had lost that hold on her. ‘For heaven’s sake, Cathy, how can you doubt I’ve always loved you? Whatever they’ve said to you, you’ve always been my little girl, and I’ve done my best to make you happy, haven’t I?’
He saw the hesitation in her eyes, the struggling feelings. She might be fighting it, but she still loved him.
In a gentle voice, he said, ‘I won’t lie to you, Cathy. But you have to understand why I did it! You’ve listened to them – aren’t you going to listen to me? Don’t you think you owe me that much?’
She sighed, nodded. ‘OK, I’m listening.’
‘Thank you, darling,’ he said in a soft, humble voice.
Steve picked up that note and gritted his teeth. God, he’d like to smack the lying, manipulative bastard in the teeth. Why couldn’t Cathy see through him? But then Gowrie had had her on his team all her life. She was bound to him by old affection and loyalty. It must be very hard for her to turn against him now.
‘Despite what Colbourne says, it wasn’t for the money,’ Gowrie said, his voice ringing with conviction.
Oh no? thought Steve, acid in his smile.
Gowrie looked away, into the distance of the park beyond the stable yard, the wintry trees, skeletal and dark against the sky, but his face had an even more remote look, as if he was seeing another place, another time. ‘You’d have to have been there to understand how it happened. I had got out of Prague on a back road, into the hills. The Russians were across the border and advancing fast. Their collaborators in the Czech army and government had already shut the airport and the border posts but we thought they wouldn’t dare stop us leaving – even the Russians respect diplomatic immunity. But I had to move fast. I wanted to pick up my wife and child and get the hell out of there. But when I arrived . . .’ He
broke off, swallowing as if there was a lump in his throat.
Cathy was moved by the huskiness in his voice. He couldn’t be pretending; nobody could sound like that if they didn’t mean it.
‘That was when I heard . . . found . . . that . . . that our baby had died,’ he said in a husky, stammering rush. ‘She had been so special, little Cathy, I couldn’t take it in at first, I guess I was out of my mind with grief, so was your mother . . .’ He met Cathy’s eyes and said angrily, ‘Well, I’m too used to calling her that to change now! She has been your mother, most of your life . . . just as I’ve been your father!’
‘I didn’t say anything,’ she said in a placating voice. She had heard this story from Sophie; hearing it from him made it seem somehow different, gave her a new idea of how it had been. Sophie had left out his feelings, hadn’t seemed to realize he had had any, but of course he must have been shattered. It had been his child that died, after all. He was only flesh and blood. She found it hard, that was all, to realize that he had been the father of another child. His image kept shifting in her head, spinning like a kaleidoscope into new patterns. She was so confused. Her own image was fragmenting, too: who was she? The person she thought she was had never existed, then – so who was she? She couldn’t relate to this Czech girl, Anya – that girl had ceased to exist in 1968, she had died.
I am not that girl. I am not Czech. I am not Anya. I do not have a sister or a family in a foreign country.
But who am I, then?
‘I didn’t know what the hell to do,’ Gowrie was saying, and she looked at him, blankly – who was he? Not her father, not her father.
He said, ‘Your mother . . .’ then stopped, meeting her wounded eyes and looking away quickly, frowning. ‘My wife,’ he substituted, as if she had spoken. ‘My wife . . . was in a bad way; she had always been highly strung, and this had pushed her right over the edge. She was so desperate I thought she might kill herself. Then you toddled in.’ Again he stopped and looked at her then away again. ‘The Czech maid’s little girl,’ he added, and the pain inside her grew worse. That was what she was to him had always secretly been. The Czech maid’s child.
‘I didn’t even know who you were or where you had come from,’ he went on. ‘Only that you were the same sort of age as my own daughter, with the same colouring – one two-year-old is much like another.’
Steve made a muffled sound, like laughter, but when Cathy looked at him she saw rage in his eyes. He turned his head to look at her as he felt her gaze, and she felt his sympathy, knew he was sorry for her, had to look away because she was afraid she might start crying and that was the last thing she wanted to do, break down in front of him and Sophie.
‘My wife ran at you, sobbing,’ Gowrie said. ‘She picked you up and wouldn’t let go of you. She thought you were her own baby, she kept calling you Cathy, and that was what gave me the idea. I had to get her out of the country, safely back home, I was scared what might happen to her if she was trapped there, couldn’t get out. She would never have recovered from that double shock. I couldn’t let that happen to her. She needed to get home, back to the States. I admit I used you, Cathy . . . yes! I used you, you see I don’t deny it.’ His eyes were liquid with emotion, with pleading, coaxing her to see the story his way, to be convinced. Words were his stock in trade, he lied easily, without thinking. ‘But only to save her sanity. You know she’s been balanced on a knife-edge all your life, anything could have tipped her over at that moment. She needed you, Cathy, and I was ready to grab at anything that helped her.’
Cathy looked back into her childhood and remembered her mother’s good times and bad times – the increasing strangeness of her weeping and laughing, the hysteria, the frightening outbursts when she threw her arms round Cathy, clutched her, covered her face in kisses, held her too tightly, scaring her silly. The sinking into silence and staring, her thumb in her mouth, rocking back and forth in her chair, while five-year-old, six-year-old, eight-year-old Cathy watched and wanted to cry, wanted to get away from this strange, scary mother who was unlike the mothers of any of her friends.
‘But why keep it up once you were back in the States?’ Steve asked coolly. ‘Why not tell Mrs Gowrie’s father what had happened? Because you didn’t, did you? He has no idea that Cathy is not his granddaughter.’
Gowrie looked into Cathy’s eyes and spoke to her, answering Steve. ‘Your mother needed you so badly, I couldn’t do that to her. If I had told Grandee I was afraid he wouldn’t let her keep you. Cathy, be honest with yourself – was what I did so terrible? If I hadn’t taken you to the States you would have grown up in the most abject poverty – your real mother had nothing. She would barely have been able to feed you, she couldn’t offer you much of a future. I was doing her a favour, taking you off her hands; she was half crazy after losing her husband.’
Sophie angrily burst out, ‘You’re twisting the truth! Yes, she’d lost her husband and she was desperate – so what did you do? You took away the only thing she had left that she cared about. Her baby. And you left her feeling guilty. Isn’t that crazy? She lost her husband and her child on the same day, and ever since she’s felt she was to blame.’
‘She was looked after,’ Gowrie defensively said. ‘And so were you. She had plenty of money from me. If she felt that badly, why did she accept it?’
Flushing, Sophie said, ‘Because she was terrified to say anything! She was afraid of what might happen to her, and to me, too. You know what life under Communism was like – she was afraid she’d be accused of collaborating with the enemies of the state. Taking money from an American spy . . . she thought they might shoot her.’
‘You’re making my case for me!’ Gowrie told her, then looked at Cathy, ‘You see what I saved you from? It wouldn’t have been much of a life. Even now, they’re living on a very basic level.’ He looked at Sophie. ‘That’s true, isn’t it?’
She nodded, her face tense. How could she deny it when she had struggled and fought to escape from that poverty trap, from having to scrimp and save every cent just to buy clothes or shoes for herself.
Gowrie gave Cathy an insistent stare. ‘There you are – even she admits it! Instead of living on the breadline and going without all the things that make life pleasant, even bearable, you were brought up as an American “princess”. You had everything a girl could want – lovely clothes, dogs, ponies, the best education money could buy.’ He stopped and gave her a pleading smile. ‘And you were loved, you can’t deny you were loved. By me, by your mother, when she wasn’t sick, by Grandee. You had a happy childhood, Cathy. And if you tell the world what you’ve found out, if you insist on ruining everything I’ve tried to do for you, Grandee will disinherit you and your mother will lose any chance she has of recovering her sanity, because whenever she remembers anything she wants to see you.’
Her mother occasionally came out of her long retreat from reality and was pitifully herself for a while, clinging to Cathy as if she were the child and Cathy the adult.