His Secret Family (ARC)

by Ali Mercer

  ‘Do you remember me telling you about the paintings I was asked for, Mark? The ones they want for that collection in London? I’ve left them out in the spare room so you can have a look. I have to say, though, I’m not sure quite why you’re interested. Or why anybody would be, come to that.’

  ‘I suppose it seems poignant. Given that it’s all that’s left,’ Mark said, putting down his empty sherry glass. I’d had sparkling water, but as I was driving back that wasn’t much of a giveaway.

  ‘You didn’t mention any paintings to me,’ I said to Mark as we followed Ingrid into the little spare room. He didn’t answer, but gave me a look I recognised, the look that meant I should tread carefully.

  ‘They’re not paintings, really,’ Ingrid said. ‘More like daubs. Mind you, you could say the same thing about the local amateur art show, and they’re meant to be in full possession of their faculties.’

  There were two unframed paintings leaning against the pale pink walls of the otherwise bare little room. One was large and rectangular, and the other was small and square. They had both been done with oil paints on canvas. Otherwise, they were alike only in being wildly different to each other and to anything else you might have expected to see in Ingrid’s flat.

  The large painting was painstakingly detailed, and showed a landscape that was just about recognisable as the parkland surrounding us, with the wall that ran along the roadside and the wrought-iron, spike-topped gate that separated the end of the drive from the highway. It was all rendered in tiny circles in gaudy shades of brown and green; there was something peculiarly intense about it. It seemed to vibrate with energy, so much so that it was almost uncomfortable to look at.

  The small square painting next to it was a complete contrast. It was little more than a series of outlines, done in a faded brick-red that looked like old blood; most of the canvas had been left blank. It showed a group of heads in profile, with bandaged eyes and toothless, open mouths.

  ‘This is all I kept,’ Ingrid said. ‘The old shower room was full of them. I got rid of the rest. I actually couldn’t face going through them all – they were rather depressing. I held on to these because they were on top of the first pile I came to.’

  I said, ‘So these were done by people who were patients here? When it was still a hospital?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Ingrid said. ‘They would hardly have been done by the people who live here now. Mr Dobbs upstairs likes his colour-by-numbers, but on the whole we tend to prefer the tidier sorts of hobbies, like coin collecting and Sudoku and bridge.’

  ‘I had no idea you’d kept any of this stuff,’ Mark said.

  ‘It was as a memento of my father, really. He was so keen on all of this. He thought it might help to diagnose them. Very forward-thinking for the time, though these days people like to write nasty things about what went on in places like this. It must have been terribly difficult. Especially for him. Well, you know…’

  She faltered. I said, ‘You mean because of your sister.’

  Mark had told me very little about his aunt, who had spent most of her life being cared for in that very building, back when Ingrid’s father had worked there. I was curious; Ingrid never usually spoke about her. Mark had only discovered that she existed after her death, when Ingrid rang up out of the blue and told him about the funeral. That had been during our brief rocky patch, when he’d moved out for a couple of weeks, though thankfully, Ingrid didn’t know about that. It was just as well that she’d never found out about my long-ago crush on my work colleague; Mark might have just about forgiven me, but Ingrid would never have done.

  ‘Exactly,’ Ingrid said, pulling herself together. ‘My father was very careful not to bring his work home with him. It was essential to have clear boundaries, under the circumstances. For him as well as the rest of us.’

  Mark said, ‘The landscape’s easy to recognise. The one of the people looks like a nightmare.’

  ‘Actually, it’s quite factual,’ Ingrid said. ‘Crudely done, of course. But it’s much older – late forties, if I’m remembering rightly. They used to take the patients’ teeth out – there was a theory about it, something to do with gum disease making them worse. And they would have worn bandages like that after they’d had leucotomies.’

  I said, ‘Leucotomies?’

  ‘An operation on the brain,’ Ingrid said. ‘You must have heard of it.’

  ‘You mean… like a lobotomy?’

  ‘Well, yes. It’s a particular type of brain surgery.’

  ‘Surgery? I thought it was pretty much a case of sticking an ice pick into someone’s skull.’

  Ingrid raised her eyebrows at me. ‘They used to do it as a last resort, to relieve patients’ symptoms when nothing else could be done for them. You must remember, they didn’t have the medication then that they have now. It’s what she had. My sister. Did Mark not tell you that?’

  Mark said, ‘Do we have to have this conversation? We’re about to have lunch, after all.’ And he stalked off back in the direction of the living room.

  For a moment Ingrid faltered. Then her expression hardened and she turned her attention back to me.

  ‘I suppose it’s as well for you to know,’ she said. ‘Mark’s very squeamish about it, as you can see. If you know, you’ll be able to be sensitive about things like this if it ever comes up. Not that it’s the kind of thing that would usually come up. But I don’t know what passes for dinner-party chat these days.’

  I said, ‘How come they did that to her?’

  ‘She’d always been backwards, but when she became a teenager she became much more wilful. If they didn’t do something, she was going to end up getting herself into trouble – that was what my mother said to me about it later. My father signed the consent form. He thought it was the best hope she had. I never saw her afterwards, but my parents did. They weren’t to know it would leave her so much worse. Manageable, which was an improvement in a way, but pretty much incapable. Or so my mother told me.’

  I said, ‘How old was she? When they did it?’

  ‘She was eighteen. I was fourteen. I knew there was something wrong with her, of course. She used to get by in public. But only just.’

  ‘Did you… miss her?’

  Ingrid gave me a long hard stare.

  ‘You have to understand, I adored my father. And for him to have a child who was like my sister… You have to remember what a stigma it was. He was a doctor. He’d devoted his whole life to caring for people like that.’ She shook her head. ‘It was brutal. I just felt so sorry for him.’

  ‘But not… for her?’

  The look Ingrid gave me then would have frozen a waterfall. It reminded me of the way Mark could be sometimes, but infinitely icier.

  ‘You shouldn’t judge what people did or how they felt in the past by today’s standards,’ she said. ‘More to the point, you shouldn’t judge me, or my parents. After all, the time may come when somebody has cause to judge you.’

  And with that she ushered me out, pausing only to close the door firmly behind her before escorting me back to the living room.

  * * *

  Luckily, after another sherry Mark seemed to forget all about his aunt and how she had come to live out her life in that very building, and remembered that he had an announcement to make.

  ‘I have some good news,’ he said. ‘Very good news. We’re having a baby.’

  Ingrid almost dropped her sherry glass. Then she recovered herself and set it down.

  ‘You mean… I’m going to be a grandmother? I never thought… I mean, I had the impression you were perfectly happy as you are…’

  The transformation in her was astonishing to see. I’d never seen her look like that – hopeful and shaken at the same time, as if life had just presented her with a gift that was so wonderful, so off-the-scale generous, she couldn’t quite believe her luck.

  She got up and went over to Mark to embrace him, and then, to my astonishment, embraced me, too.

  ‘Than
k you,’ she murmured in my ear. Then she withdrew and sat down again, still visibly stunned.

  ‘I take it you might be willing to babysit every now and then,’ Mark said.

  ‘Of course. If only you weren’t so far away…’

  ‘We won’t be, for much longer. We’re planning to move out of London. We won’t be right on your doorstep, but we’ll certainly be a lot closer.’

  ‘Well, that really couldn’t be better. That is perfect.’

  ‘It is,’ he said, turning to me for affirmation. ‘Isn’t it?’

  He reached for my hand and squeezed it, and I smiled and agreed with them both.

  It didn’t occur to me to be apprehensive. It seemed to me that Ingrid was right: everything was perfect. And when, a couple of months later, I was confronted with evidence that it might not be, I was so preoccupied by my pregnancy that I completely missed it.

  * * *

  Every family has a skeleton or two in the closet, and every marriage has ghosts. They’re the might-have-beens, the also-rans, the ones who got away. Mostly they stay in the background, like the kind of phantoms you might be told about by a tour guide at a stately home. But sometimes – usually when you’re least expecting it – bygones cease to be bygones, and the past comes roaring back to life.

  That was what happened on the day of my twenty-week scan, although I didn’t know it at the time.

  Mark took the morning off work to accompany me to the hospital. There were times when I felt a cold shiver of doubt about how much he was really looking forward to having a baby; he’d been pretty lukewarm about the ante-natal classes we’d gone to, and although he’d dutifully put the cot together, he’d been more than happy to leave the business of choosing it to me, along with shopping for all the other things it seemed we’d need. But then, he loved talking about the future and what our family life might be like, and he was as just as keen on going through the baby name book as I was. It was a big change, that was all, and he was adjusting. We both were. And when it counted – when it really mattered, like today – he was there.

  Probably he was just apprehensive. That was fair enough: so was I. And even if he was finding the whole thing a bit daunting, I had complete faith that he wanted to be the best dad it was possible to be.

  We took a taxi to the hospital so we wouldn’t have to worry about finding a space in the invariably crowded car park, and arrived with plenty of time to spare. There was a newsagent’s in the little row of shops just inside the entrance, and Mark suggested going in to browse before heading to the waiting room.

  ‘I thought you had work to be getting on with,’ I said. Mark had brought his briefcase with him; he was dressed in a suit, so he could go straight on to the office afterwards.

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘But I wouldn’t mind looking at the things I might read if I had time.’

  Inside the newsagent’s, Mark went to look at the display of books by the tills and I headed towards the rows of women’s magazines. I’d become a walking collection of pregnancy clichés; my attention span was shot, and all I wanted was a soothing drip-feed of familiar themes – makeovers, problems overcome – that would distract me from the prospect of giving birth. In spite of the birth plan and the classes and so on, if I was honest I was dreading it.

  I didn’t actually hear what Mark said to her to start with.

  I looked up to see him standing next to her. She was nothing special: a tired-looking woman who’d just finished paying at the checkout. She had a sulky little girl with her, and she didn’t seem at all like the kind of person that Mark would know.

  I heard what he said next, though. He was looking down at the little girl, and he said, ‘So who’s this?’

  The woman nudged the girl to move aside so that other customers could make their way from the tills to the exit. She mumbled a name I didn’t catch, and then the girl piped up: ‘I hurt myself on the iron. Mummy unplugged it and left it on the worktop, and I climbed up to sit on the windowsill behind it and I touched it with my leg and it burned me.’

  She pointed to the bandage around her knee; she was wearing school uniform under her coat, a red jumper with a sensible grey skirt and slightly drooping socks.

  ‘I was very brave and didn’t cry at all,’ she went on. ‘But Mummy said we should have it looked at, so we took Ellie to school and then we came here.’

  Mark said, ‘Ellie—?’

  ‘My youngest,’ the woman said.

  ‘She’s only four,’ the little girl said disdainfully. ‘It’s just as well we didn’t have to bring her, because I think she would have got very bored waiting and been naughty and played up.’

  ‘We should get you back to school,’ the woman said. I had moved so that I was standing by Mark, but she didn’t acknowledge me at all, or even glance in my direction. ‘Come on, Ava.’

  And with that she took Ava by the hand and hurried out, with Ava protesting loudly that some sweets really would have made her knee feel better and maybe they could find a shop that was a bit cheaper on the way home.

  Once they had gone I said to Mark, ‘I hope that isn’t a sign of things to come. That woman looked exhausted. Also, it didn’t seem the smartest thing to do to leave a hot iron somewhere where the kid could get to it.’

  ‘Sounded like one of those freak accidents to me,’ Mark said. ‘I wouldn’t rush to judgement. She’s probably doing her best.’

  ‘Who was she, anyway? Not an old flame, I hope?’

  I said it as a joke. I’d seen pictures of Mark’s college girlfriends – long-haired, pretty, sporty girls, girls he would have enjoyed showing off. It never would have occurred to me that he might have history with a worn-out blonde with an inch of dark at the roots, who’d gone out in jogging bottoms and trainers but looked like she only ever ran anywhere if she was late.

  ‘She’s a hairdresser,’ Mark said.

  ‘Really? She didn’t exactly look the part. Maybe she’s on a career break.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘If I let myself go like that, will you tell me, so I can do something about it?’

  Mark didn’t smile. Maybe I had been too mean. I hadn’t intended to be harsh – but I really didn’t want to end up like that. Looking so harassed, so overburdened – so much as if it was all down to me.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell you,’ he said, and I went back to browsing the magazines and forgot all about it.

  Thirteen

  Ellie

  That first night in France I dropped off almost instantly, then surfaced to find Ava standing by her bed in her pyjamas and folding back the covers. I wanted to speak to her but couldn’t rouse myself enough, and maybe it was half a dream anyway. Then I fell back asleep even more deeply than before.

  When I came to again the bedroom was middle-of-the-night dark, and the long net curtains were stirring in the breeze from the sea; we’d left the French windows slightly open. Someone else was standing there, in the darkness, between my bed and Ava’s, close enough to reach out and touch.

  A girl. She was younger than me, perhaps five years old. I couldn’t make out what she was wearing in the gloom; a nightie perhaps. She was rubbing her hands together as if she was cold, even though the room was warm, and she had her back turned to me and was humming a tune I didn’t quite recognise. Maybe it was a theme tune to a children’s programme I’d liked myself a few years ago, but had grown out of.

  She was there and not-there. I couldn’t move, so I had no way of finding out what would happen if I tried to make contact – if she’d just disappear, or if she’d turn round and start talking. And then she slipped away, or I slipped away, and sank back into my dreams.

  Just before I woke up for real, when the bright daylight was already filtering round the edges of the hotel curtains, I found myself in the most vivid dream of all. I was flying over green countryside, which was spread out beneath me like a map, and then I was hovering over a house set in parkland, with a broad river snaking round the edge of the grounds. It wa
s a big old house, red-brick, Victorian, not friendly-looking, with wings extending on either side, topped by spiky turrets and parapets. And then I was at the riverside, and it was very quiet but not entirely silent. I could hear birds and trees stirring in the breeze and the rushing of running water, and someone speaking, or maybe thinking out loud, in a faint but insistent voice: This time it’ll work. It has to. He’ll bring them here and then we’ll see.

  It sounded like an old lady, but it definitely wasn’t Grandma. I would have loved to hear Grandma speak, but she never did: she was more a warm, comforting presence than an actual personality. This old lady was a presence all right, but she was neither warm nor comforting. She was proud and strong-willed, and she wanted something, wanted it badly, and nothing else would do. Even though her voice was hushed there was nothing frail about it.

  I wanted to ask her, What? What has to work out? What was the chance that went wrong? But I couldn’t speak, and nothing more was said.

  I turned away from the house towards the river and saw a heron standing on a wall alongside it, patient as a statue, watching and waiting with its neck arched and its curved beak ready to strike. There was something ancient and reptilian about it: it was so still, so poised, and so sure of itself. It looked as if it could stay there forever without tiring or losing concentration, as if what mattered wasn’t whether it made a catch or not, but only that it stayed ready to.

  It turned towards me and regarded me steadily and levelly with its yellow eyes.

  You’ll see me again before this is over, it seemed to say.

  The stillness of the moment broke like a bubble as it arched its wings and suddenly took flight, following the curve of the river out of view.

  And then I came to in the room I was sharing with my sister in the Grand Hotel in France, and Ava was still sound asleep in the bed next to mine even though a maid had just come in with our breakfasts. There were two identical silver trays lined up next to each other on the desk, with croissants and juice and, for Ava, a little silver pot of coffee. Each tray was decorated with a single rose in a slim silver vase.