‘Back when I was twenty-six, I … I was … well … I was sort of raped.’
‘Good God, Prue!’ Dad pulls back from me, letting his cane fall to the railing, and grips both my hands. He grips them tight as the boats ebb and rock beneath us, going their merry way under the bridge. ‘Prue, Prue, I—’
‘The thing is, I don’t exactly know if I was or not and that’s almost the worst thing, that I don’t know for sure. Remember I went to Tenerife that summer, in nineteen ninety-six? To train staff at that hotel, in badging?’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘That’s where it happened. I met this man, from Belgium. He seemed nice, at first. He wasn’t.’ I hang on to Dad’s hands for dear life, anger rising. I don’t know what to say next. If I had been raped in the way lots of people imagine it – the monster in the shadows, the evil attacker following down a dark alley – it would be more clear-cut; I would be the victim, he would be the perpetrator. I wouldn’t feel so much guilt that I’d got myself into that situation – again – or maybe I still would. Maybe anyone this has happened to – from a violent attack on the street, to a ‘no’ in a living room, to a ‘I’ll let you finish because it’s easier than trying to get you off me’ in their own bed – feels that same guilt; I don’t know. That they could have done more to make it not happen to them. That they could have done less – to not make them wonder every day if they asked for this, when how could anyone ask for that?’
‘What happened, pet?’
‘I slept with him … but it turned bad …’
‘He hurt you?’
‘He was … rough …’ I say. ‘He was rough. And he wouldn’t stop.’
‘Then you were raped.’
‘Sometimes I don’t know, Dad. I don’t know. It’s all such a tangle, in my mind. I go over it again and again because I just don’t know. I invited him in. I invited them both in.’
‘You were raped,’ says Dad, squeezing my hands. ‘And he did it in such a way that you would be trapped in doubt and confusion about it. I’m so sorry, love. I’m so, so sorry.’
I let go of Dad’s hands and I stumble into his arms, breathing in the warm skin at his neck, that smell of Imperial Leather soap and washing powder. I can feel the tears on his cheeks on mine. I can feel his heart beating.
‘I don’t want to be trapped any more,’ I whisper.
‘It’s not your fault,’ he whispers back. ‘None of it is your fault.’ He strokes my back and clutches me tight. My dad. My lovely dad. Eventually he pulls away from me and his eyes are red and watery.
‘I remember now, when you got back from that trip,’ he says, a waver to his voice. ‘You were very withdrawn at times, but at other times very over-bright and chatty. I thought you were just exhausted. But I also remember you changed departments not long after that, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. I had to. I couldn’t do the badging thing any more; I had to shake off all the memories that came with it. I resigned, Dad, long before I was actually made redundant from that place. I resigned from my life and I’ve been resigned my whole life, to who I am.’
‘Roo.’ He is hugging me again. ‘Roo. I’m sorry you went through all that alone, both those things, though each time I was right there. I was right there … I’m so sorry I didn’t know.’
I press my hands to my eyes and wipe away my tears. ‘I didn’t want to upset you, to make things worse.’ But I knew not telling him, all these years, had made me worse.
Dad clasps me tight to him again and whispers again, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t know.’
‘I knew after the first time that no one would ever love me,’ I sob. ‘I knew then exactly how people would always see me. As ugly. As not good enough.’
‘Then you knew wrong,’ says Dad. ‘You are beautiful. You didn’t deserve those things to happen to you.’
‘I’m ugly, Dad! I’m ugly inside and out! I should always have known it.’
‘Stop, cucciolo! I know I haven’t seen your face since you were ten years old, but you were beautiful then and I know you are beautiful now. You have always been so very very lovely. Inside and out.’
‘You’re only saying that because you’re my dad,’ I sniff, through my sobs.
‘I’m saying it for lots of reasons. That’s only one of them. Nothing is too big to overcome, pet. You’re strong, I know you are. You just don’t realize it yet.’
We both fall silent. I look out over the water. I’ve told him. I’ve told my dad. And it hurt to tell him but now I do feel as though the chains around my heart have been loosened a little; that he has held them in his hands and shaken them free.
‘Are you OK?’ he asks me, placing his hands on my shoulders. ‘Do you think you can be OK?’
‘I can be better,’ I say. ‘Better now I’ve told you. Shall we walk again?’
He nods and I retrieve his cane from the railing, and we set off, our footsteps in unison. A barge hoots; a bird calls in flight above us and is answered by another. The birds are talking once more.
‘I hate the thought of you being hurt,’ says Dad. ‘I hate the thought of either of you girls being hurt. If I can stop that happening, then I will.’
‘I know, Dad, I know.’ He looks like he is wrestling with himself, somehow. He is biting his lip, face contorted. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes. No. I think I’ve got something to tell you now.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yes.’ That biting at the lip again. The tapping of his cane. The rhythmic stepping of our feet. An elderly motorbike splutters past us, its driver in leather and goggles. ‘Your mother is not in Sweden.’
We break our step. Well, I stop, and because Dad is holding on to my elbow he has to stop too. ‘What? What do you mean she’s not in Sweden?’
A jogging man with headphones circles round us. ‘Pardon me,’ he says, American accent.
‘She’s in London. She never went to Sweden. She’s been here all along. Well, apart from that bloody hippy trip around Europe …’
‘I don’t understand. She didn’t go to Sweden? She just made that up?’
‘I made it up.’
‘Dad, you’ve lost me. You need to explain what you’re talking about.’
We have stopped dead on the bridge and are in the way of everyone. I steer Dad over to the railing again and this time I grip it tight, my knuckles whitening as they push against my skin.
Dad takes a breath. His eyes are still red-rimmed. ‘I couldn’t have her coming in and out of your lives like that, so infrequently. It just wasn’t fair.’
‘Go on …’
He sighs and rubs at his eyes. ‘I tracked her down, sometimes, in between those visits, to a squat or a horrible bedsit – she’d refuse to get her act together, refuse to come and see you. Other times I feared she was dead. You know, when your mother first left she told me she wanted some time off, to be free of everything, and I told her, yes, “go”. I said, “Do what you need to do.” I was young but I loved her so fiercely, so determinedly – determined that we were going to make it work, this marriage. I thought we’d be together for ever – how naïve was that? I thought this was a temporary wobble. Yes, she might need to do this – go away for a while – but then she would come back and everything would be all right.’
I had thought so too, hadn’t I?
‘Let’s walk again,’ I say, peeling my hands from the railing and letting Dad take my arm. I need to move, to be in motion, and there’s a gap in the stream of people ambling along the bridge. We set off, once more, our steps in sync.
‘So, I got the bus with her,’ resumes Dad, ‘helped her take some stuff to Janice’s, who was waiting for her with two bottles of beer and a cigarette. I never thought, when I dropped her off, that this was the beginning of her screwing up her life. Destroying part of yours. The drugs, calling herself Starflower …’
‘Starflower? I don’t remember that,’ I say.
‘Maybe she spared you that bit …’ He turns his head and smiles
at me, and I try to smile back. ‘In nineteen eighty-four I found her in another grotty dosshouse and I told her I couldn’t have it any more, you girls waiting and hoping and wondering, and that she must come and see you and tell you both she was moving to Sweden.’
‘Choose Life,’ I whisper to myself. ‘And of course we believed her.’
‘I was so angry with her!’ cries Dad. ‘I said, “I don’t want them looking for you on every street corner, thinking they see you getting on every bus, or going into a shop. Thinking you’re going to turn up on the doorstep.”’ He sighs. ‘I wanted you to think she was far away so there was no hope, Prue. You and Angela. Because it’s the hope that kills you.’
One foot is going in front of the other. Dad and I are still in step. I wonder if the hope had killed him, in the early days after Mum left. Each time she didn’t turn up. Every time he tracked her down to another dosshouse. All the times he missed her and had to be everything to us, because she was gone. ‘All this time,’ I say. ‘All these years and she was in London!’
‘Yes. Look, I’m telling you this now because I don’t want Angela to carry on trying to find her. Ringing the consulate, emailing places in Sweden … hurt by the disappointment when her mother doesn’t reply … I don’t want you hurt. I don’t want you hurt ever again.’
I’ve stopped walking again. He was hurt; we’ve all been hurt. My mother is in London and has been here all along. I’m not sure where to insert this information in my life, where it slots. Does it make any difference? Does it make any difference that she was in the same city as us rather than one thousands of miles away? That she was shooting up in a grimy bedsit in London instead of a skinny Stockholm townhouse with a snowy front step? That she will grow old under London’s streetlights and not beneath Sweden’s midnight sun? I feel unsteady, and that the bridge under my feet may collapse at any minute.
‘Are you OK?’ says Dad.
‘Yes,’ I fib. ‘I’m OK. Thank you for telling me. And thank you for the lie.’ I’m trying to stay upright, on this bridge. I’m trying not to crash. ‘I know you were only trying to protect us.’
‘I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you from everything,’ replies Dad, tears in his eyes. ‘Everything that’s ever happened to you. I’m so so sorry.’
We carry on walking. One foot in front of the other. Dad’s cane. My sandals. We’re nearing the end of the bridge. Sparrows chirp at each other and a mum tells off a child for dropping an ice-lolly stick into the water.
‘Shall we go and get an ice cream, Dad?’ I ask him.
‘Yes, please. I’d like that.’
CHAPTER 42
The unburdened father and daughter buy gelato, we wander around Chelsea and we carry on with our afternoon in the sunshine, cloaking our revealed secrets in chatter about mint chocolate chip versus passionate and the weather, but the more we prattle on, the quieter I know we are inside. The more burdened, after all. Our hearts are still and our minds full, and we are wondering. We are wondering what it cost the other to conceal our secrets for so long, how hard we tried to protect each other, the private pains we suffered for keeping our counsel. Was it a mistake to reveal those secrets now? Have we hurt each other irrevocably with them? A dad knowing his daughter has been abused, and he wasn’t able to see it? A daughter who was shielded by her father in a thirty-four-year-long lie, who had an absent mother living in the same city all along? I am wondering a lot of things right now. But I feel my father and I are both thinking the same thing – that we are beginning to truly know each other again, after all these years, although we are yet to calculate the cost.
Eventually, we get the bus back to Chalk Farm and it expels us on to the pavement, hot and slightly weary. It’s two hours before I’m meeting Salvi at Finsbury Park, half an hour before Kemp arrives to pick Dad up for their trip to the reservoir.
‘Where does she live? Our mother?’ I ask Dad. We’re the other side of the road to the brown double doors. We’re waiting to cross Haverstock Hill to the first island.
There’s a beat. ‘Haringey, I think.’
‘Haringey!’ That’s only about five miles away. I feel an immediate sense of my throat tightening, of claustrophobia almost. ‘Do you know whereabouts?’
‘No.’
I notice a moment’s hesitation in his voice, in the configuration of his facial features; just a tiny one – a chink appearing between two curtains closed against sunlight. ‘Dad?’
‘There have been rumours,’ he says. ‘About where she works.’
‘Rumours? Rumours from where?’
‘Remember that volunteer who used to come round and try to take me out? The one I was sent by the council?’
‘From about five years ago? The one you always sent packing?’
‘Yes. Him. Tom.’
Tom grew up in our road in Clerkenwell. When he used to try to pick Dad up from The Palladian, he’d come upstairs, plonk himself in one of our chairs and not stop going on about it. How he used to knock and ask Mum for one of those Ice Pops she was always giving out, or play ‘Chicken Square’ with us. He was a weedy-looking thing who rode a Grifter. ‘Yes, I remember him.’
‘The last time he came round, before he finally gave up – you were at work, I think – he told me he’d seen her, or thought he’d seen her, Ellen. Working in a shop in Muswell Hill. Said he never forgets a face.’
‘Even from decades before? What sort of shop?’
‘A travel agency. It’s … well, from what he said, it’s near your clinic, where they do the lasers. Where I used to take you.’
‘A travel agent’s,’ I say slowly and carefully, as though I’m drunk but trying to pretend I’m not. As though I can cope with the fact my brain and my mouth have turned to cotton wool.
We’re still at the kerb. People behind us tut but then notice my dad’s cane and say ‘Sorry’ or smile at us. I don’t smile at them. We’re teetering on the edge. I’m teetering on the edge. My mother works in the travel agent’s two doors from Loved Before. She works the other side of the laser clinic that has never been any use to me. And she has never been any use to me either, but she has been there, all this time.
‘Why are we not crossing, Prue?’ Dad’s cane is tapping on the kerb. His Adidas Italias scuffle impatiently. He knows how close we are to home.
‘She works near one of my shops. One of the clothes shops I always go to. Only two doors away.’
‘Oh. Have you seen her? You haven’t seen her, have you?’
‘No, of course I haven’t seen her!’
I feel angry. I feel we have been tricked, my sister and I – Angela, who cried for our mother over and over again, and me, who didn’t. I feel a fool that I’ve been mere feet away from her and I didn’t know. That while I was browsing dresses in Loved Before she was very close at hand and we could have passed on that street and she could have seen me, and I would have seen her. Without preparation. Without warning.
I have been so so close to her – a woman hiding in plain sight – and I simply didn’t know.
‘Kerb down,’ I say, and Dad and I cross the street to the first island. ‘Kerb up,’ I say as we arrive there. ‘Kerb down,’ I say again, when we step off it. We reach the pavement outside The Palladian. We’re at the brown doors. I’m putting my key in the lock.
‘Are you all right, Prue?’
‘Perfectly, Dad,’ I reply.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and the expression on his face is so full of contrition and anguish and hope and love, I almost hug him like I never want to let him go and tell him it’s OK, that it doesn’t matter, but instead, after I open the brown door and we go up the iron stairs and into the flat, I walk to the cupboard in the sitting room and rifle under the photo album and the sketchbook and Dad’s old A–Z and pull out my old square sewing box, the one with the creaky lid and the red and orange raffia flowers on the top.
‘What are you up to?’ asks Dad hesitantly.
I feel for a stack of pale blue, thin enve
lopes, edged in red and blue chevrons and secured with a faded elastic band, from under the material needle book and the cotton reels and the Japanese lady pincushion, and I place it carefully in my bag, between my purse and my powder compact.
‘I’m going to see her.’
CHAPTER 43
Chalk Farm tube station is packed. Loads of people are crammed into the ticket hall, sweaty and complaining because it has just been announced there are no southbound trains, due to a signalling problem at Morden.
‘Don’t even bother, love,’ says a man in a Bart Simpson vest top, and I step straight out again, back on to the pavement and the unrelenting late-afternoon sunshine. There are no black cabs in sight. Shall I get a bus? I can’t bear to wait for one. There’s a massive queue at the bus stop and everyone at it looks hot and murderous. I’ll have to walk. It’s about five miles. I can walk it. I’m fired up enough. Or I could try and get an Uber? I’ll walk and try to get an Uber. I get my phone out of my bag, sliding it past the stack of Angela’s blue airmail envelopes, and click on to the app.
‘Bertie!’
Kemp is coming up the pavement towards me. He’s wearing a blue checked shirt over a white T-shirt. Ubiquitous jeans and boots. He looks all perky and handsome, precisely what I don’t need right now. I keep my head down, pretend I haven’t seen him.
‘Bertie!’ He’s standing right in front of me.
‘Please would you stop bloody calling me that! Why are you so early?’ I tap my destination into the app. My nearest available driver is Derek, Ford Mondeo, eight minutes away.
‘I’m just early.’ He shrugs. ‘Well, actually, I wanted to talk to you. You look awful, by the way. Where are you going?’
I look up. ‘Thanks. None of your business. I’ve got an appointment.’
‘What sort of appointment?’ I recognize that blue checked shirt. He often wore it to the pub.
‘Mind your own business,’ I repeat.
He’s not moving. I’m going to have to swerve round him. I want him to bugger off. I slalom round him, but he grabs my arm – firmly but gently – and stops me in my tracks. His arm is tanned. The sleeves of his shirt are rolled up. I don’t want his hand on me.
Summer in the City Page 30
