Lying there, as the light slowly strengthened, she began to relive the dreams and thus the first six years of her life. She had been handed to Gran as a very tiny baby, only a few days old, by Louella. She could understand in a way why her mother had been forced to part with her. It would not have been easy to continue a stage career with a very young baby to look after, and no husband to support her. But why lie about it? She realised now that all her dreams had been pictures of her past, tiny incidents sometimes, which had actually happened. Champ was as real as Gran and Troy; the scene on the beach had really taken place . . . and the fact that Jack Russell had said she was a natural swimmer was, surely, the best confirmation of all, because Troy had taught her to swim the very first time they had visited the seaside together.
And then, of course, the whole thing became clear. Louella had been returning to Liverpool, and the Gaiety theatre, with a daughter she scarcely knew. She could not have realised that Lottie meant to run away as soon as she was able, could not have understood, either, that the lure of the stage was not something felt by everyone. She would soon have begun to see, however, that though you can take a horse to water you can’t make it drink, for this would most definitely have applied to young Lottie, because all she had wanted had been to return to her old life with Gran and Troy.
So when the accident had happened and Lottie’s memory had been completely erased, Louella must have heaved a huge sigh of relief. What was more, now that Lottie thought about it, her mother had done just what the doctors had forbidden: she had taken every opportunity to tell Lottie about those missing years. Only what she had told her had been a tissue of lies, which Lottie had accepted because it had never occurred to her for one moment that her mother was not speaking the truth. Naturally enough, this meant that when her memory began to function, presenting her with pictures of her true past, she had dismissed such memories as mere dreams.
As she lay there, staring at the ceiling above her head, resentment began to grow. Louella had been ruthless in her pursuit of what she wanted, never giving a thought to Gran, pretending she had never known anyone named Troy, steadfastly denying that either she or Lottie had ever visited Yarmouth. Lottie had believed her mother when she said she had to bleach her daughter’s hair so that they looked more alike, but now Lottie was sure this had been a ruse. The blonde hair had made Troy back off, thinking she really was someone else . . . in other words, it had been a disguise.
There were other things, too. She did not know what her real name was, but Gran and Troy had called her Sassy and she remembered, now, that Louella’s first child assistant had been called Lottie. So even my name is not my own, she thought miserably. Louella took my past, the people who loved me, the name I was known by, and simply bundled them out of sight for her own convenience. Oh, God, and Gran must have thought I’d taken to the life! What else could she think, when she waited and waited in Blackpool, and I never came? That was what Troy meant when he came up to me in Rhyl and accused me of letting Gran down . . . and it’s ten years ago. Oh, God, what must I do, what must I do?
She scrambled out of bed, ripped back the curtains, and went over to the washstand. She splashed water noisily into the basin and began to wash. Behind her, Merle groaned and sat up. ‘Whazzamarrer?’ she said thickly. ‘Wazza hurry?’
Lottie had soaped herself all over; now she was rinsing off, trembling with a mixture of cold and fury. She removed the last of the soap and began to rub herself dry, then turned to Merle. ‘I’ve remembered,’ she said. ‘You know, the six years before I had the accident. And – and everything’s changed. Louella’s been lying to me for the past ten years. I’m going to have it out with her.’
She was dressing and Merle promptly heaved herself out of bed and began to drag her own clothes on, not bothering with a wash. ‘If you’re going to challenge Louella, then I don’t mean to miss it,’ she said, beginning to brush out her tangled curls. ‘But what happened, Lottie? Did them six years just come floodin’ back? Are you sure you haven’t been dreamin’?’
‘Positive,’ Lottie said briefly. She did not mean to explain about the dreams to anyone right now. ‘It’s – it’s a bit as though there was a door in my head which has been closed and locked because I believed there was nothing behind it except for what Louella had told me. Only every now and again I’d see something – or someone – which seemed familiar, and I’d ask Louella about it. She put me off each time, but I was getting increasingly doubtful about what she told me and then, when I woke this morning, the door in my head flew open and the things which had really happened came tumbling out.’
‘Gosh!’ Merle said in an awed voice. ‘How do you feel? It must be like going around for years with a heavy pack on your back, and then suddenly finding it’s slipped off.’
Lottie laughed. ‘Yes, it’s a bit like that,’ she admitted. ‘But at the moment I’m so furious with Louella for all the lies she told that I’ve not really taken in anything else.’
She set off across the bedroom and clattered down the stairs, Merle close behind her. But with her hand on the doorknob she turned to face her friend, feeling the colour draining from her cheeks. It was all very well to talk about having it out with Louella, but she had no proof. If Louella continued to deny everything . . . but it would make no difference, not now. Very soon she would be Sassy again and even Louella would not dare to deny the change of name which she had forced upon her daughter, doubtless for fear that if she used the name Sassy her child’s memory would come flooding back.
Lottie took a deep breath, turned, and walked into the kitchen. As she did so, she felt Merle’s hand slip into hers, and her friend said in a low voice: ‘Be brave, love, and don’t let her get away with any more lies.’
Louella was at the stove, stirring porridge, and Baz was toasting bread and passing the slices to Max, who was stacking them up on a plate. To Lottie’s surprise, Jack Russell was also present. He grinned at her cheerfully. ‘I brung a dozen eggs what I bought off of me landlady’s cousin, and invited meself to breakfast,’ he said, before either girl could speak. ‘So it’s scrambled egg on toast for brekker this morning. Hope you’re hungry as hunters!’
Lottie was opening her mouth to reply when Merle dug her in the ribs. Louella turned away from the stove and began ladling porridge into the dishes arranged around the table. ‘I’m glad you two are up, despite your late night,’ she said briskly. ‘I want the pair of you to come down to the theatre with me.’ She turned a smile of ingratiating sweetness on Merle and her voice dropped a couple of tones. ‘Darling, I want you to instruct Lottie in your modern dance routines. I promise you she’ll only be doing the dances whilst you’re – you’re temporarily away . . .’
Because of what Merle had told her, Lottie recognised the sudden infusion of sweetness in her mother’s tone and it helped her to come to the point at once. ‘Louella, I want some explanations, please. For a start, where’s my birth certificate?’
Her mother stared, then shrugged and once more her voice changed its tone. ‘Your birth certificate? Darling, I haven’t the foggiest notion, but why on earth do you want it? It seems a strange thing to ask for on a Sunday morning, when we’re all about to enjoy scrambled eggs.’ She turned to Jack. ‘It was so good of you, Jack, to buy them. It’s true, isn’t it, that Mrs Parrot’s cousin owns a farm on the Wirral? That means that they’ll be really fresh; a rare treat for us townies.’ She had continued to ladle porridge as she spoke and now she gestured to everyone to take their places at the table. ‘Eat up! There’s milk in the blue jug and sugar in the bowl, not that you should need either because this is the creamiest porridge I’ve ever made.’
Max, Baz and Jack took their places, but Lottie and Merle remained standing. ‘I want my birth certificate, Mother,’ Lottie said firmly. ‘You are my mother, I take it?’
Pink colour gradually crept up Louella’s neck and dyed her face. She said stiffly: ‘You know I prefer you to call me Louella. And now do get on with your porridge, darling, because I can’t start scrambling the eggs until those plates are scraped clean.’
She was trying to sound jokey but Lottie, knowing her well, could hear the underlying strain, so she ignored her mother’s words and actually held out a hand and snapped her fingers, right under Louella’s nose. ‘I want my birth certificate,’ she said steadily. ‘And I want the truth so I’m going to tell you a story. My name isn’t Charlotte, or Lottie, it’s Sassy, and you gave me away when I was only a few days old.’ Standing there in the kitchen, she proceeded to tell the story of the first six years of her life as she now knew it, and had the satisfaction of seeing Louella go alternately as red as a turkeycock and as white as a sheet. No one else was eating their porridge; they were all staring at her, open-mouthed. Even Baz, who knew about the dreams, looked astonished.
When Lottie got to the meeting in the clearing, Louella actually burst into speech. ‘It’s all nonsense, stupid nonsense!’ she shouted. ‘Who’s been talking to you, filling you up with lies? As if—’
‘You have; been filling me up with lies, I mean,’ Lottie said resolutely. ‘You sat by my hospital bed and told me I’d been your partner, singing and dancing and helping you with the act. Whilst anyone might still recognise me as Gran’s Sassy, you would never do a summer season, though Max frequently begged you to do so. You made all sorts of excuses, Louella, but they were just excuses. You knew that Gran and Troy were often at the seaside in summertime, and you didn’t want to meet them, or rather you didn’t want me to meet them. You only agreed to go to Yarmouth because I was older and you thought I looked quite different. You thought that if Gran had walked up to me and called me Sassy, I’d not have known who the devil she was, so you assumed you were safe . . .’
At this point Max broke in, though his voice was tentative. ‘But Lottie, darling, I’ve met performers who worked with Louella and Lottie when you were no more than three or four. How do you explain that?’
‘Easily,’ Lottie said. ‘My mother hired a little girl called Lottie for several years. But the little girl’s own mother realised how popular the child was and took her away with her, back to France. It was then that Louella decided to reclaim me, having been quite content to leave me with Gran for the previous six years.’
‘But – but how did you find out?’ Jack Russell broke in. ‘I know you said your memory has come back, but a baby of a few days old don’t remember nothin’, not so far as I know.’
‘When my memory returned, I remembered Gran telling me, when Louella came and snatched me back, that she’d thought of me as her own child since Louella had handed me over when I was only a few days old,’ Lottie said steadily. Abruptly, she turned to her mother. ‘Do you want me to leave here now and come back with someone who can confirm every word I’ve said? Or would you try to say they were telling lies, too?’
At the thought of such a confrontation, Louella’s courage deserted her. She began to babble, saying that she had had no choice. She had had a little baby she could not look after, and almost no money. She had been offered a job with a circus, as the magician’s assistant, with the possibility of other work. She would share a caravan with a couple of the girls who rode the liberty horses, but there was no room for a baby. Mrs Olly – the woman Lottie called Gran – told fortunes and travelled all over the country in her funny little caravan, with her young grandson. She was about to leave for her winter quarters, since the circus only wanted side shows in the spring and summer, but she promised to let Louella know where she was so that Louella could send her money for the baby’s keep and visit whenever she had the time.
‘It seemed the ideal solution,’ Louella said tearfully. ‘Everyone assured me that Gran – they all called her Gran – was marvellous with children and would take care of my baby as though she was her own.’ She looked defiantly round at her speechless audience. ‘Can’t you see I had no choice? Max, you must understand.’
‘In a way, I can see your predicament,’ Max admitted. ‘But remember, Louella, I’ve been in a very similar position myself. Baz was three months old when my wife left me – left us, I should say – but it never crossed my mind to hand my little son over to anyone else. Of course I employed people to keep an eye on him when I was actually performing, but otherwise I simply did my best. When he was teething, or had the colic, I scarcely slept . . . but you don’t want to know that. All I’m saying is, I wouldn’t have handed Baz over to anyone else for a thousand pounds.’
‘But I’ve told you, I had no choice,’ Louella insisted. ‘There was no room in the caravan for a baby, and – and I’ve never been good with kids. I thought it was best that little Lottie was brought up by someone who understood babies. And of course I meant to visit her as often as I possibly could.’
‘But you never did visit, not once in six years,’ Lottie reminded her. ‘You did send money at first, but even that had stopped by the time I was three or four. Then, just when you’d lost the first Lottie – the one who wasn’t really your daughter – you had an enormous piece of luck. You read an article about us in the paper, Gran, Troy – he’s her real grandson, incidentally – and me, how we’d seen a nearby barn struck by lightning. We went and warned the farmer, and helped him fight the fire. The feller from the newspaper said Mrs Olly was a fortune-teller, and Sassy and Troy her grandchildren, and that was enough to put you on our trail. You followed us because you needed a child for your act, and I was just about the right age. You can’t pretend you loved me, or you would have visited, if nothing else.’