The Art of Forgetting

by McLaren, Julie

  “Did you know her? Please, if you could just think for a moment? I know, I know, but what am I supposed to do?”

  They put her into the car and my dad drove her home. He was ages and he didn’t get to the crematorium until after it was all over. I remember my mum kept glancing over her shoulder when we were in there, in case he came in. She was holding me really tight, but that didn’t stop the shaking. That’s all I did as the vicar said something and they sang another hymn. I didn’t cry, just shook, so violently that my teeth chattered. And then he slid away and there was some audible crying from the front and that’s the last I can remember until the cold air hit me, outside. There were a few worried faces looking down at me and I was sitting on a bench. It was a bright, but bitterly cold day and someone was saying, “Get another coat or something, the poor girl’s freezing,” but it would take more than another coat to stop that shaking. It started in the chapel and it carried on for three days.

  When I woke up that morning, I was shaking too. Barry noticed it as I was pouring coffee.

  “Your hand’s shaking,” he said. “Are you OK? Are you sure you should be driving?” He had that worried little frown that always got if I was ill, even if I only had a bit of a headache or indigestion. It used to annoy me and I’d snap at him and tell him to stop over-dramatising everything, but of course it was only because he cared so much. The thought of losing me made him panic, even if there was no justification for it. Poor Barry. It wasn’t until I knew he was dying that I ever felt like that, that all the lights were going to be turned out, and by then it was too late.

  I held my hand out and forced it to be steady.

  “There, look. It’s not shaking at all. It was just the weight of the coffee jug,” I said. Then I chatted brightly and told him something Laura had said about the weekend and asked him about his day so he wouldn’t question me any more about my trip. Part of me felt like an absolute heel, but it was a small part; nothing like as big as the other part which asserted my determination to have some kind of a life of my own, something that was mine in my own right, not as a mother, not as a wife, just for me. I don’t know why that would make me shake though, so there must have been something else going on.

  You know how it is. Obviously I knew that he wouldn’t be an eighteen year old boy, but I didn’t know how else to picture him. Every day when I look in the mirror, I have the same feeling. Bloody hell, what’s happened to you? Just for a second, a microsecond, I am shocked at the way my eyes droop, my jawline sags. I am not that woman on the inside and I know that’s not an original thought and hardly worth recording, but I had it anew when I saw Andy. He was sitting in a leather armchair beside the brick fireplace in the lounge bar, a pint on the table in front of him. Although I recognised him immediately, I couldn’t help the little stab of disbelief. For a start, he looked as if he had doubled in size at a first glance and his hair was streaked with grey. The Andy I had known was a skinny little thing, hardly a man at all really, with dirty-blonde hair and downy cheeks. This person waiting for me was an adult. What was I doing, meeting a strange man in a pub?

  I had forgotten a lot about Andy and the way we had been together. Because it had been so intense with Vic, a lot of my memories had faded quite quickly. But we had been together for some months and it had been, for both of us, the first serious relationship we’d had. We had lost our virginity together, for God’s sake, that should have meant something to me, but it had felt like the first time all over again with Vic so I suppose I kind of pushed that to one side. I didn’t regret anything about Andy, it just didn’t seem important in the great rosy glow that was Vic.

  That’s why I wasn’t expecting it, but when it happened it seemed so normal, so natural, I didn’t have time to think about it before it was over and too late anyway. If I’d told anyone, which of course I didn’t, I’m sure they would have said how naïve I was, and of course he’d been planning it all along, but I seriously don’t think that’s true. We’d had hardly anything to drink, both of us having driven there, and we’d eaten and chatted, filled in a lot of the gaps in each other’s lives just like he’d said in his email without the slightest hint of anything untoward. There had been nothing flirty in his manner or mine and the time had passed in pleasant reminiscence. We’d laughed quite a lot, mostly at our funny, serious, younger selves and then we’d almost simultaneously looked at our watches and known it was time to go. Mission accomplished.

  He used to do this thing when we were walking. We walked everywhere in those days, as the van belonged to the drummer and it was usually full of stuff. We’d be holding hands, or his arm would be round my shoulders and he used to dip his head and kiss me just above the ear, every now and then. I’d totally forgotten that but, as we were walking to the car park, suddenly his hand found mine and he did it – dipped his head and kissed mine. I looked up, probably in surprise and before I knew it we were kissing, leaning up against somebody’s car like a couple of kids.

  It was only a kiss. I suppose it could have gone further if we’d wanted it to. There must have been some kind of anonymous hotel room we could have gone to and had sex on the anonymous bed, but he didn’t even suggest it and I wouldn’t have agreed if he had. It was just the final part of our trip down memory lane, I suppose. We’d talked about all the things we’d done together and this was the one thing we hadn’t covered. It was sweet and gentle and wistful and sad all at once, but it wasn’t sexual, not really. Not that anyone would have believed me, including Barry, so I didn’t tell him. But I wish to this day that I could have, that I hadn’t felt the need to lie about the whole thing right up until the day he died. No more lies now.

  So, there I was, in a room that would have been a cupboard if it had been much smaller, with a tired-looking policeman. He looked as if he’d just fallen out of bed and he smoked continuously, holding out the packet to me every time he took one himself although I had told him I didn’t smoke. He was finding it difficult to work out why I was there and I was finding it hard to explain. Why are you telling us all this now? Why didn’t you say anything three years ago, when it all happened?

  I told him about Vic dying and how it had changed the way I looked at things. I told him I wanted to help Linda’s mother to come out of her black hole and that I wanted to start university with a clean sheet. It had taken such a long time and there had been so much agonising before I got to this point, I wanted everything to be right. I also told him I had been young and silly at the time and now I was different, but I don’t know what he made of it all. He was about my dad’s age, so I must have still seemed pretty young and silly to him.

  He wrote everything down, laboriously, in handwriting that was barely joined up and I read it back and signed it. The grammar and spelling were appalling and it was all I could do not to point out the mistakes, but at least I had enough sense to know that composition was not the important thing here. At last the stone was being removed from my chest. I had been carrying it around for all this time and I had got used to its presence, its pressure, its ability to remind me from time to time that I didn’t really deserve to be this happy. Strange, that it took the complete absence of any happiness at all to provoke me into dealing with it.

  Chapter 16

  Laura puts the pad on the bed beside her. She feels as if she has been dropped from a great height. There is too much to assimilate, too much to understand.

  Who was this Vic? Such a massive figure in her mother’s life and yet they have never even heard his name mentioned. Not once. All this time they assumed it was Andy who had died, but it turns out that he was alive and well relatively recently and making assignations with Mum! Laura can hardly believe that her mother went to meet him without telling her father, that they kissed, that she kept the secret right until the day her father died. Part of her feels angry and betrayed on his behalf, but then she thinks about what she has been doing. So much more than a fleeting kiss for old time’s sake. Down there, in her mother’s kitchen, she threw
her head back and cried with the pleasure of it. On the very kitchen table where she had eaten her breakfast before going off to school for so many years. No, she is in no position to judge.

  She looks at her watch and sees that two hours have passed. Now she will have to cut short her visit to her mother. More pressing than that though, is the need to share what she has read. She needs Kelly to read it too, but knows she is teaching all day. She tries to summarise some of it in a text but it is too difficult. There is so much and Kelly needs to read it herself, from the start, as she has done. She deletes everything and starts again.

  Found the missing piece of the jigsaw. Another pad. You really need to read it! This eve?

  This time, they meet at the house. It is Friday, so Kelly does not have to worry about work the next day and Laura can get on with fitting the stair gates whilst Kelly is reading. That’s what she thinks when they speak, but it doesn’t happen like that. She sits beside Kelly, intending to read maybe just the first couple of pages with her, but she is still there as Kelly looks up an hour later, her eyes brimming with tears.

  Neither of them speaks for a few minutes. Laura finds it crippling sad to compare the vibrant, resilient person her mother was with the frail, fragile person she has become. She can’t imagine the trauma she went through, then to come out whole on the other side. She tries to think about how she would have felt if Patrick had died before they married, before they had the children. Would she have known then that he was the love of her life? Would she have been as devastated? Would she have been certain that no future relationship could ever match that one? She doesn’t think so. Nor does she think that Emil is that other half of the jigsaw her mother had described. She is not sure she believes such a person exists, but her heart aches to think that he might be out there somewhere and she will never know him.

  However, this is not the time for thinking of such things. Kelly wants to talk. It is hard when the foundations of your childhood seem to be shakier than you had believed. What would have happened if Vic hadn’t died? What would have happened if their father had found out about Andy? Why did no-one ever speak of Vic? Laura thinks that total silence was the only way her mother could deal with Vic’s death. It must have been some kind of pact with the whole family, she says. It is hard to think that their parents’ relationship – that had always seemed so solid – was actually based on some kind of compromise on their mother’s part. There has been a tectonic shift in the plates of their family history and there is no telling what the effects might be.

  Eventually, they decide to leave it. They will go home and let it all settle for a while. Laura will take the pad and make sure the narrative fits in between the other two, then they will talk again soon. They get as far as the door and then Laura stops.

  “Hang on a minute. I may as well take that carrier bag with me. I can sort it out over the weekend. No point in putting it back in the loft.”

  She is nearly home when she hears a text coming in but she doesn’t stop to read it. She waits until she has pulled up outside the house. She knows it will not be Emil – it can’t be, as he doesn’t even have a mobile and hasn’t got her number – but the logic of that doesn’t seem to stop her heart skipping every time she hears the familiar ping. However, it is Kelly.

  We didn’t even talk about Linda! Sure there are some clues in there. Need to read it again.

  Laura replies with a quick OK. This has occurred to her too, but she was hoping Kelly would forget about Linda for a while. Something is niggling, something she read. It is as if a critical clue is hiding in her mother’s words, just out of sight. She can almost feel it and that means that Kelly will too, sometime. The problem is, if Kelly picks up on it there will be no stopping her. Laura hasn’t forgotten the incident with Gordon Carpenter’s son, and it has been difficult enough avoiding Kelly’s conversational sallies in this direction without a whole new line of enquiry opening up. She wants to put it all to one side until the wedding is over and Wendy and her family have gone, but there doesn’t seem to be much hope of that.

  The weekend rushes past as they always do. There are all the usual chores, all the usual places to ferry the children, all the usual preparations for the week ahead. Sometimes Laura wonders how she ever coped with working full time, but she tries not to think about those days. It only makes her sad and she knows she can never recapture them. Even if she could go back to work, she would not be the same Laura; that simple Laura, harassed but contented. Now she is the Laura who keeps secrets, who yearns for another man to get in touch, whose life is so horribly complicated. The Laura whose own mother seems to have walked a similar path. Is it a family thing? Is she destined to be like this?

  On Sunday evening, when everything is as organised as it can be, she fetches the carrier bag and spills the contents onto the carpet in front of the sofa.

  “What on earth …?” says Patrick, his eyebrows raised.

  “We found another part of Mum’s story. It was in the loft, in this bag. I’m just going to check through then chuck the rest of it out.”

  She waits for Patrick to ask about the story, but not with any real expectation of it happening. He simply doesn’t seem to be interested.

  “The recycling’s almost full,” he says, but that doesn’t seem to require a response so Laura starts to rummage through the heap of what appears to be mostly papers. She puts the newspapers in a pile, puts a quirky little china bird to one side – Lily might like that – and starts on the envelopes. Most of them are empty or contain only junk mail, but one of them contains a letter from Wendy, written shortly after she emigrated. She will give that to her when she arrives. That leaves some foreign coins, two broken cassettes and various scraps of paper. She only glances at these before putting them next to the newspapers, but one of them is thicker and folded in half and half again. She opens it out and reads:

  The Jarvis House Clinic

  Name: Linda Bakewell

  Date of birth: 16/08/1950

  Please attend for your procedure on: 18th September 1971

  Please arrive by 9.30am.

  There’s more. Instructions about what to bring, what to do and not to do, but Laura barely skims it. Her heart is pounding in her ears. Is this Mum’s appointment? Did her mother have a termination? But why on earth would she be calling herself Linda? Then she looks at the date of birth and sees that it is nothing to do with her mother after all. This is not an appointment for her but for Linda, using Bakewell as a surname. So she was pregnant, and booked into a clinic.

  Laura turns the card over and sees that someone has written on the back. The blue ink has faded, but is still legible.

  My darling Polly,

  I know you won’t like this but I can’t do it. I have thought about nothing else for days, but it’s our baby and it’s against everything I believe in. I might go to hell if I do it. Please don’t be angry but come and see me as soon as you can. We can work it out.

  I love you,

  Linda

  That’s when it all starts to fall properly into place. The niggling suspicion Laura has been trying to ignore ever since she found the final section of the story has grown into something more like certainty. Her uncle Paul is involved in this. He must be. She barely dares to think it, but why else would Linda use Bakewell as her surname? And Polly – that is clearly a nickname and it is easy to see how it could derive from the name ‘Paul.’

  But none of that would be enough without her mother’s words. She fetches all three pads and skims through them, and yes, there are clues. This is what Kelly meant and what has been lurking around in her own mind all this time. Paul’s strange behaviour when Mum first wanted to tell the police. How he begged her not to upset the family. The way he behaved at the funeral when Hilda turned up drunk. The friend at the gig who thought he had been going out with Linda, and his denial. It all adds up and now Laura hasn’t a clue what she should do.

  The next day, she is no closer to a decision. Part of her wants to
talk it all through with Kelly, as they have been partners in this from the start. It feels terrible to keep it to herself, but she knows she will have no control over Kelly’s actions. Once the words are out of her mouth there is a high probability that Kelly will do something rash – or at least something with far-reaching consequences. She might decide to go to the police and then what would happen? It is only a week before the wedding and her uncle could be taken in for questioning. The whole event could be ruined and that would not be fair on Amy. Whatever happened all those years ago was nothing to do with her, that’s for sure. Even if Kelly decides to keep the police out of it and confront Paul instead, there will be a huge family rift just when they are all meeting up for the first time.

  So there are compelling reasons to keep it to herself at least until after the wedding, but then suppose Hilda dies? She had looked frail enough when they saw her months ago, but suppose she is hanging on in there and there is a chance for her to know the truth after all these years? Suppose Paul knows where Linda is, or where she is buried? Every day might be Hilda’s last. Laura could be responsible for letting her go to her death in the same state of terrible limbo that has blighted her last forty-odd years. It is all too difficult to bear, so Laura decides to go to see her mother. Maybe it will all fall into place if she stops thinking about it.

  She doesn’t pay much attention to the figure standing half in the road beside a parked car, only a few minutes from Cavendish House. It is not a car she recognises, it is raining and the person is swathed in a long raincoat and wearing a hat. She slows, glancing in her mirror before pulling out, but then the figure steps further into the road and waves. She has passed before her brain catches up, but then she indicates and stops as quickly as she can, her heart pounding. It is Emil, and he is running along the side of the road towards her. She watches as he approaches. His running slows to a jog and he walks the final ten yards or so, one hand on his side. Laura cannot help thinking how old he seems as she looks away from the rear view mirror and prepares to greet him, but her heart is beating faster all the same. She winds down the window and he leans in.