Last Kiss Goodnight Read online

  Last Kiss Goodnight

  A heart-breaking story of lost children and the power of a mother's love

  Teresa Driscoll

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part One

  Moscow

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Moscow State Orchestra

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Moscow State Orchestra

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Two

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part Three

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Epilogue

  Letter from Teresa

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Recipes for Melissa

  Recipes for Melissa Excerpt

  Also by Teresa Driscoll

  for Peter, James and Edward

  Part I

  Part One

  Moscow

  November 1960

  My Martha,

  I write, guessing and fearing this may not reach you. But what else to do? Three years now with no word…

  Friends tell me I should give this up. But I find that I just cannot.

  And so I will continue to write, preferring to dream, to hope, to pray that just one of these letters will somehow get through to you. I do not want to believe the alternative; that you choose not to reply…

  Please don’t let that be the reason…

  And so if these are the lines to finally reach you then let me reassure you that I have been writing constantly via your father’s address. And above all – please, please do not believe that it is too late.

  If I cannot find you, then come and find me, Martha. I beg you.

  I love you still and I will love you always. Everything I said to you was the truth, I swear. And everything I do in this crazy life I now lead, I still in my heart do for you.

  I would never have left if I felt it would turn out like this. Never.

  Please Martha. Do not give up on us.

  * * *

  Your Josef x

  1

  Aylesborough-on-sea – 1976

  * * *

  Her behaviour is ridiculous. This Kate knows but cannot help.

  Even as she darts forward to claim the front seat on the bus, she can imagine sitting further back, watching herself with professional concern. This strange unrecognisable self. This woman now anxiously spreading out her three hessian bags to discourage anyone else from joining her. A woman displaying all the classic symptoms of compulsive behaviour – taking the same bus on the same days and arriving ridiculously early (despite the absence of queues) to ensure she can enjoy the same seat.

  Of course she should give this up. Break the pattern while she still can. But what Kate knows also is that alone on this front seat, high over the world, with the smell of the sea spray and the gulls calling overhead, she will, for a time at least, feel safe.

  She checks her watch – eight minutes and twenty eight, twenty nine, thirty seconds to go – and opens the local paper. A sigh.

  It will feel better once they pull away. Once the speaker system crackles into use. Yes. Very soon she will be able to relax. Eager now for the familiar commentary. The scripted jokes.

  It is her tenth trip with the Open Top Tour company and Kate has today managed to negotiate a discount on her tickets, lying that she is researching tourism for a book.

  In the first week, she took the bus twice – Monday and Wednesday – but is now opting for all three tours on the winter schedule, building her week around them. The pleasure for Kate is two hours out of the house yet with no requirement to either talk. Or walk. Two hours away from the packing boxes. Two hours away from Toby.

  She has lied to him too about this new addiction, inventing research at the local library for an imagined Open University course. It made him smile, hoping some new project might help. It’s good that you are getting out again, Kate. Really good. But no. Kate closes her eyes. Ashamed.

  It is not good. All a lie.

  ‘Can’t keep away then?’

  Kate is relieved to recognise Mike’s voice – the least intrusive and most surprising of the tour guides – a tall, undernourished man with a striking, Roman nose. Dark hair. Dark horse. All the guides have the gift of the gab, the patter perfected, each following the same script, but Mike always adds a little something new each time. Some nugget of information dug out here, some observation picked up there.

  She folds her paper, turns and manages a smile, confident he will check her ticket quickly – knowing better now than to take the conversation any further. She turns back then to look ahead as the diesel engine chugs into gear and the bus pulls away, her breathing slowing, her heart steadying. Waiting for the smells. Peanut butter sandwiches remembered from bus trips in her childhood. Fish and chips from the tourists on the benches below. Diesel and fumes from passing traffic. And then the clear, glorious salt of the sea spray.

  Kate closes her eyes to begin her swim; arm over arm, slow and confident – heading towards the lighthouse in the distance. It so calms her. To swim in her mind’s eye. Searching in the safety of the daylight. Imagining each stroke through the clear, cool water – ahead of her the beacon of white and red…

  No longer manned, of course. Most lighthouses are becoming automated these days… Mike’s voice fades as she swims further and further, faster and faster – the light beckoning; the water refreshing. Her arms rhythmic and strong. Left. Right. Left. Right. Pounding through the waves to the purr of the engine and the beat of Mike’s scripted monologue...

  Now, if you take a look to the left, you will see the double doors of the Old Ropery…

  On and on she swims. And daydreams. And drifts. Floating periodically on her back for a breather once to catch the eye momentarily of a young man sleeping rough in the bandstand of the park just visible over the hedge, then turning over to continue her swim. Left. Right. Left. Right. Until suddenly, as the bus turns onto Willow Street, there is a jolt.

  Kate surfaces and opens her eyes as Mike pauses briefly then apologises for the congestion, caused by – a bloody BMW driver – ’scuse my language – who is trying to squeeze into the last remaining parking meter by the quayside. Kate leans forward to take in the scene. The BMW is stuck at a forty-five-degree angle, ready to reverse into the parking space but now unable to move, blocked by a white Transit van which has turned from a side street and cannot reverse because of the traffic behind it.

  Kate watches, amused, as the BMW and Transit drivers both emerge from their vehicles to start remonstrating. As a little crowd gathers, Mike thinks passengers might be interested to know that the little shop to their r
ight – the Minstrel’s Place – is the only building in Willow Street to have survived the Blitz…

  But Kate is no longer listening. She is not interested in the Minstrel’s Place, nor indeed in the drivers’ escalating dispute. For something unexpected has caught her eye.

  A man eating a pasty is now blocking her view and she has to lean back to correct the angle and see more clearly. Infuriatingly, the man steps back himself, his considerable stomach blocking her line of sight yet again so that now she has to lean forward. And then suddenly, a clear view. And there she is. A strange woman sitting alone on the middle bench, overlooking the quay.

  Knitting.

  Kate moves her head, as she processes the picture – zooming in slowly as she tries to work out why the image so jars. For it is not just the knitting which seems out of place on this blustery November day but the whole picture. As if it is in the wrong frame.

  The woman is striking – very high cheekbones and a neat, perfect nose – and yet oddly dishevelled, with unkempt long hair drawn back in a rough ponytail. She is wearing an oversize coat, secured at the waist with a large black belt which clearly belonged once to a man and not to the coat or the woman in question. She is wearing short, green wellingtons and has three plastic bags alongside her on the bench.

  But what is most odd, what has caught Kate’s eye, is not only is this faux bag-lady clearly too young for the job, but that she is knitting what appears, from Kate’s position, to be a baby’s matinee jacket. A beautiful lemon colour, with the wool tucked safely on top of the first bag so that it will not fall onto the damp pavement. And it is this paradox – the contrast of the pale, baby lemon alongside the general grubbiness of the woman – which has caught Kate’s eye.

  Kate pauses for a moment, staring all the time as the needles click, click away, and tries very hard to censure her response. In her head, her professional voice whispering the first warning. No, Kate. No. Toby’s voice follows louder and more strained – You need to rest, Kate; take better care of yourself – and then finally her doctor’s familiar tut-tutting. But Kate ignores them all, bites into her lip and makes the decision very quickly, so that in no time at all she is tucking her paper back into her bag, gathering up the rest of her things and hurrying down the spiral stairs.

  From his commentary position alongside the driver – passengers might like to know that the waiting time for a berth in the marina is now two and a half years – Mike raises an eyebrow as Kate heads for the door. ‘Sorry, Mike. I’ve got to go…’ and then she is stepping, almost tripping, off the bus, all eyes of the six ground-floor passengers following her.

  Back at street level, Mike’s voice in the distance, Kate feels for a moment the familiar sense of anxiety which permeates so much of her life now, but takes in a deep breath against it and moves all her bags into her left hand so she can tuck the hair blowing across her eyes behind her right ear.

  Years in her job have given her a confidence in approaching strangers – even (some might say especially) odd strangers – but today Kate does not feel confident as she moves towards the figure still click, clicking away at her task on the bench. What she feels is an unsettling mixture of both apprehension and inexplicable compulsion.

  The woman knitting does not look up and Kate decides to fetch tea to excuse and assist her intrusion. A prop.

  There is a mobile van parked alongside the quay, popular with the fishermen, so Kate queues there, all the time watching the woman, whose eyes only stir from her work when a gull hops down alongside for a few minutes, searching beside the bench for scraps of food.

  Clutching two mugs of tea (the man apologises for the chipped mugs but fishermen so hate that horrible polystyrene and can you please return them?), Kate walks tentatively over to the bench, trying but failing not to spill the drinks, which are over-generously poured to the point of surface tension.

  The woman pauses as Kate sits, eyeing the mugs curiously and looking around for a moment as if for the person to whom the second drink is to belong.

  Kate runs her tongue around the inside of her top lip. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I thought you might like a cup of tea. Warm yourself up?’

  A knowing expression flashes fleetingly across the woman’s face before the eyes settle, her gaze hardening. ‘I prefer coffee actually.’ The tone is pointedly neutral and she pauses then to assess Kate’s reaction, which is to blush, first with embarrassment and then irritation, not at this woman’s apparent ingratitude but at her own clumsy stupidity; for bumbling in so awkwardly. Setting herself up for this.

  But then as suddenly as Kate feels the flush deepen – hotter and hotter – the woman’s expression softens.

  ‘The thing is I can only drink tea with vast quantities of sugar.’ A different tone now. A tilt of the head. ‘Albert at the van would have put sugar in, if you’d told him it was for me. Two huge spoonfuls. Appallingly bad for me.’

  An olive branch? Yes. A definite change of tone. And now the woman is reaching out for her tea, but Kate keeps a firm hold on both mugs, then nods and marches straight back to the van, hot tea scorching her hand as she manoeuvres the mugs for the required two spoonfuls of sugar – glancing back anxiously at her bags left alongside the woman, half expecting her to run off with them. Some con. Some scam over sugar which she tries regularly perhaps?

  And then Kate is back – sitting alongside the woman who is now smiling and sipping her tea. The bags untouched.

  ‘So – God squad, is it?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Well – free tea usually involves the big man upstairs. You into all that, then?’

  The woman’s voice is a surprise – deep and rich. Almost certainly privately educated and Kate finds herself laughing out loud. God squad? She – Kate Mayhew, who believes in absolutely nothing right now?

  ‘No. Sorry. Not my thing at all – faith. You?’

  The woman shakes her head and only now, as Kate moves her foot, accidentally knocking over one of her own bags, does she notice there are actually six between them lined up neatly alongside the bench – three plastic and three hessian – a sight so odd it prompts her to laugh again, then unexpectedly add the truth. ‘I’m a social worker actually. Off duty. In fact, off my rocker just now, if the doctors are to be believed. Extended sick leave.’

  ‘Oh.’ And then Martha – as she is to introduce herself – looks at Kate very earnestly as if she has confessed to some crime, and Kate wonders if it is the job or the alleged breakdown she pities…

  When, in fact, it is something else entirely.

  For Martha is reading the unexpected on Kate’s face – this strangest of frissons between them – wondering now which question will come next.

  What she is knitting?

  Or why she is knitting?

  2

  It is the birds not the bus which wake Matthew in his bandstand.

  He hears the open-top tourer hovering along the hedge, its lower floor invisible. Catches the eye too of a rather strange woman on the upper deck, fussing with her bags. But Matthew closes his eyes then as the diesel engine draws away, to listen again to the birds, so glad that they should wake him here – relieved for his first thought to be music and not the cold.

  As if just for him, they repeat their call now – three notes, three times over. And then Matthew smiles as he identifies them, not the birds but the notes, picturing them on the music page; subconsciously moving his fingers inside the sleeping bag as if at the keys of the piano.

  A G E flat.

  And again. A G E flat – the last note held long and soft.

  Even as a very young child, Matthew could do this. Name musical notes – recognising them instantly in the same way most people recognise colours. For a long time he took the gift for granted, presuming everyone could do it, for him just the norm; some genetic quirk like the curl to his hair or the paleness of his eyes which made his father inexplicably wince and look away sometimes when he did not know Matthew was watching throug
h some distant reflection.

  Not until he was nearly eight did Matthew learn that his gift had a name. Perfect pitch.

  And was rare.

  One in ten thousand people, his music teacher told him the day it was discovered in a singing class. Do you have any idea how lucky you are, child? What I would give…

  Matthew remembered the envy in his teacher’s voice as he tested him over and over. Note after note, as if he might catch him out in some trick. Some mischief.

  But there was no trick. Matthew could not explain how he knew a note’s name with no reference point. No tuning fork, hints or help. He just did.

  Yawning now as the anaesthetic of sleep wears off, he stares for a time at the lattice blanket which the light casts over him – filtered and smudged through the wooden trellis of the bandstand. Odd to see something so striking here. It reminds him of a photographic exhibition his mother took him to once – trees, pylons and telegraph poles, all in black and white with their shadows casting strange shapes. Some elongated. Some stumpy and distorted. Matthew moves his own shadow now to obliterate the mesh of dark and light, then stretches his body against the discomfort of this new life – young bones practising for old age, his nose still struggling against the smell.

  He pulls a face at the memory of the drunk who relieved himself so close to his sleeping bag two nights ago, laughing at Matthew’s outrage as the smell woke him – still new enough to the streets to be shocked. To mind the smell. To mind the loathing in the drunk’s eyes.

  No more car parks, Matthew decided that night. No more hanging around the regular haunts with the others – the bus shelter, the arcade by the fish and chip shop. To hell with safety in numbers.

  He is cold from his first night in the park but the bandstand, though small, has kept out the worst of the wind, and he likes this solitude.