Walking Alone

by Carolyn McCrae

  It appeared David had noticed as well. “A rare trockenbeerenauslese Max.” he said appreciatively. “1934, a difficult year.”

  Max nodded but said nothing, just returning to his place at the head of the table.

  He did not sit down.

  “I would like to propose a toast to Alicia. At one time the most beautiful and the most frustrating woman I have ever known.”

  We all followed Max’s lead, even Graham who seemed to be observing us as if we were animals in a zoo. We all stood and raised our glasses somewhat selfconsciously as Max effortlessly dictated what we should do and how we should act. “We must now each spend a few moments sharing our memories of her.”

  Max had once told me that during the war he had refused to accept the custom of ignoring empty places in the mess when someone had failed to return. He believed it was disrespectful and had made a point always of speaking for a few minutes of the missing comrade. ‘If a life is not worth five minutes then what’s it all for?’ he had asked rhetorically. He rarely referred to his life before he had bought the failing law firm in Liverpool and moved to the Wirral in 1941 so I had felt privileged to be given a rare insight into his past.

  “You start Charles. Be truthful. She is dead and cannot be hurt.”

  It took a few minutes for me to think what I could possibly say.

  I had heard of my mother’s death when Ted had telephoned just a few minutes afterwards. I knew she had been living with Ted but I did not really know why and, although she had only been living barely half a mile away across the golf course, I had never visited her.

  ‘Too much history Ted. It would be a waste of time.’ I had said when Ted had told me that I should talk to her before it was too late. ‘What would we say to each other? What could we say to each other? I’ve not been part of that family since Max took me and Monika under his wing.’

  ‘She is your mother.’

  But I had argued with him. ‘She may be, but I don’t think she ever thought of me as her son.’

  ‘You’re very bitter Charles, but also very lucky that Max has looked after.’

  I had been defiant. ‘Yes, I’ve been very lucky. What I am, who I’ve turned out to be, is no thanks to her.’

  Ted had put the phone down after responding coldly ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  So I hadn’t visited my Mother. And now she was dead.

  I looked around the table before I eventually stood up. That seemed to be the right thing to do and I was rewarded by a slight but encouraging nod from David.

  I sipped the wine. I was not sure I wanted to share my history with these strangers, especially with Graham. Although I was going to be careful with my words, I felt I owed it to Max to honour the spirit of what he was trying to do.

  I cleared my throat and began.

  “I hardly knew her. I don’t suppose we’ve spent more than a few hours in each other’s company my whole life. When we were little, Susannah and I, we were kept in the nursery, only brought out for a few minutes on display to our parents and their guests, they always seemed to have guests. We had to be clean and tidy and behave ourselves like little adults. I can remember nothing else of the time before she left other than a sand pit and a big teddy bear underneath a large Christmas tree in the hall at Millcourt. Then she went to Switzerland. I was 6 when she left, Susannah was 2. I don’t remember her ever saying goodbye and I heard my father say he didn’t believe she had gone to Switzerland at all. When she came back from wherever it was she’d really been she didn’t live with us so Susannah and I only saw her for odd holidays. Those were always dreadful and we spent as much time as possible out of her company. The one day she did come back to the house I had a long talk with her and quite liked her. But it was partly because of what she did that day that led me to leave and come here.”

  I glanced at Graham who was smirking as he sat back, lounging casually in his chair. ‘Yeah right’ he mouthed silently.

  “The next time I met her was at Susannah’s wedding but that was only for the few minutes she could be bothered to turn up and then briefly last year when I had had no idea she was living half a mile away. That’s how close we were. She hadn’t told me she had moved from Surrey. Neither had you Ted. So there we have it. I’m 29 years old and I hardly ever saw her. She was my Mother but I hardly knew her.”

  I heard Graham muttering ‘diddums’.

  Max waited until I had sat down.

  “There’s a lot of her in you, you know. You have much of her look. You have a lot of her selfishness and self-centredness. You go your own way, she went hers, they just weren’t the same way.”

  “I didn’t know her either, until the last few months.” Susannah began speaking very quietly, so quietly that we had to concentrate hard to hear what she had to say. “I had thought she was a bloody selfish cow. I had always thought she left us because she wanted more than us, we weren’t enough for her and I thought we should be. I hated her because she left us but I didn’t realise until recently that it wasn’t us she hated it was everything. In her head she imagined what her life would have been, what it should have been like if she hadn’t had the accident, if she hadn’t married Dad, if she hadn’t had us. She blamed life for not being what she had wanted it to be. It wasn’t our fault she was unhappy, it was hers because she could never accept what life was, she spent her whole life wanting it to be something else.”

  “Well she really wasn’t much of a Mother was she?” I didn’t want to hear about another side of her.

  “Harsh. But you’re probably right. But then she was a bit of a victim herself.” Max wanted us to remember a different Alicia. “Don’t forget that no one ever comes into anyone else’s life with a clean canvass. From the day we are born we have the baggage our parents leave us. God knows you have yours but remember she also had hers. All you can do is try to live down the legacy their parents leave them. You should try to understand her a little.”

  When Ted spoke we all turned to look at him. He was looking had at me as he quoted “Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.”

  “Evelyn Waugh I think.” Max nodded towards Ted. “Very apt.”

  As we paused for glasses and coffee cups to be refilled I wondered whether my grandmother was at all affronted by Max’s words, she didn’t appear to be. When everyone had settled down Max began his story, addressing himself to Susannah and myself, ignoring all the others around the table.

  “I first met Alicia when she was barely 21, pregnant, frightened, lonely and sincerely regretting marrying your father. She left him as soon as she had a legitimate reason. She was very ill for years, but she survived. She had to keep herself once your father’s money dried up, a situation for which she was ill prepared. She had to do many things that she found distasteful and difficult, but she survived. Through these years I met her regularly in London and tried to give her a taste of the luxury she needed.”

  It had never occurred to me until that moment that my Mother and Max could have been lovers but that was the clear implication. I couldn’t interpret the look on Susannah’s face, either she didn’t care or had known for a while. Ted looked devastated.

  Max continued “She was a most articulate, intelligent and stylish woman. She was also a fighter who battled with that awful disease until she could fight no more. For complicated reasons our relationship changed to friendship some years ago but I continued to visit her and keep her informed about her children. In all those years she never lost her concern for you. For all her strengths she didn’t possess the confidence to get back into your lives and would never had had that last chance had it not been for Ted.”

  If he wanted me to feel guilty he succeeded.

  Ted may have wanted to talk of the woman he had loved for 30 years, to explain something of the Alicia he had known but he said nothing. Perhaps he couldn’t.

  Monika broke the short silence that followed.

  �
�I knew so little of the mother of my Susannah and Charles. I believed for many years she must be evil, or mad, to leave such a wonderful home and such lovely children. I knew her only through the people who had been in her life. Now I realise she was a very lucky woman, from what you have all said, and not said, in some way you all loved her. Not many people can be loved by so many people.”

  The silence was broken by Graham

  “What’s the point of all this? It’s morbid shit. She’s fucking dead isn’t she?”

  It was David who recovered the quickest speaking with dignity and authority “Funerals are as much about the living as the dead. This is something you may learn in time. It is cathartic for people who have suffered the loss of someone they love to talk about that person, to learn details they didn’t know, to try to understand that person as others saw them. You will sit down quietly or you will leave.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “We’re not arguing with you Graham, either behave like an adult or leave.”

  “Before I go do I get my say? You’ve all indulged yourselves. Well I never met her. I didn’t want to. She knew what side her bread was buttered, she saw money and grabbed it. If she had to sleep with someone for two or three years what did that matter? When she left him she would be rich and free. Nothing more than a pro, that’s what my Dad says, prostituted herself for money. She left them all soon enough didn’t she?”

  Edie came to her daughter’s defence countering her grandson’s assumptions with dignity. “We don’t know why she did that. We must trust that she did the only thing that was possible for her. We must believe that he gave her no choice.”

  “When I get married my wife won’t dare leave me. I’d bloody well make sure of that. No question. I’d fucking kill her first.”

  His resentment of everything we stood for was clear as he pushed back his chair and walked unsteadily to the door. He seemed to be doing everything he could to show his contempt for our way of life, our mores and manners, just like a bad tempered child.

  I made a mistake that evening. I underestimated my cousin and thought him a fool.

  I had no idea at the time how much of a threat he would turn out to be.

  Edie broke the silence that followed. “I’m afraid all my sons were brought up with violence. Their father was not an easy man to live with. I tried to soften his aggression, but it was a bitter household and they have passed that violence on to their sons. Perhaps I need to tell you some things about Alicia. Perhaps if I don’t tell you now it will be too late.”

  As we all listened to my grandmother I believed that, for all the years Ted and Max had known my mother, neither had known any of it.

  “My first daughter died before she was a week old. The nurse took her away as if she had never existed. But times were different then, it was 1919 and it wasn’t only babies that died so a baby’s death was not important. There was no mourning, people moved on, they had another.” She spoke with resignation.

  “Bert knew, of course he did, that that dead baby wasn’t his. He had been in France until two months before the birth. So when I fell pregnant again he had his suspicions. He couldn’t be absolutely certain but he was pretty sure, especially when Alicia was so artistic, so beautiful, so unlike him. Or me. I wanted to call her Alison but Bert insisted she was christened Alberta. She never liked the name, she never was an ‘Alberta’. She was too sensitive, artistic and beautiful to be ‘Alberta’. She was too like her father.” With barely a pause she continued “I had met David during the war…”

  Her meaning was clear.

  “I wasn’t sent to France. I stayed in London.”

  “I bumped into him in the street. I was hurrying to get, somewhere, I can’t remember where, and I bumped into him. I was carrying a shopping basket and all the contents spilled on the pavement.”

  “I helped pick them up and took her to tea at the Lyons Corner House.”

  “And that was it.”

  “We met as often as we could from then on.”

  “For about 40 years.”

  “No one knew.”

  “After the war I stayed with Bert, away from David, another war came and went before Bert finally died. Then David and I were free to marry. But it was too late for Alicia. She never came to see us. I was never able to explain.”

  After a few moments she continued, none of us had thought to interrupt.

  “Alicia got married on her 21st birthday. Bert wouldn’t give his approval so they had to wait until they didn’t need it. She was pregnant, with you Charles, but it was wartime. Things were different then. However she did it, and whatever she did to do it, Alicia did the only thing she could and got away from her family.”

  “She was my daughter,” David spoke firmly, “and I couldn’t acknowledge that to anyone until it was too late. Though, and this is something you didn’t know Edie, I did speak to her once. It was four years ago at the Savoy. She was there with a beautiful young man, they were quite involved in conversation. I listened in as I was sitting at the table next to theirs. She was very poised, very articulate and very beautiful. She looked ill but happy and at ease with herself, and with the young man. I said ‘Good evening’ as I brushed against their table when I left. She looked at me very briefly, returning my greeting with an abstracted smile. So I did see her, that once.”

  “Oh David. I’m so sorry.”

  I looked across the table at Max. It was difficult to interpret his look. He was thinking, I could recognise that, but there was something else. He was looking at David trying to read something in his face, in his words, that was not there for the rest of us.

  “Should funerals always be like this?” Susannah asked “History being dug up and raked over?” Perhaps she was thinking of eighteen months earlier, when her husband had died. There had been no valedictory dinner, no family gathering. He had been drowned trying to kill his children. He had tried to rape Monika and she, defending herself, had stabbed him with the bread knife. We had all come under investigation and his funeral was conducted with as little ceremony as possible.

  “They are usually a time for reflection and memory, yes, certainly.” Maureen answered her. “A time for families to get together and say things they could never say at other times.”

  “Why did Graham come? He seems to hate being here.”

  Edie began to answer “I was surprised when he phoned and offered to come with us. I can only think it was curiosity. It was one of the less attractive characteristics of my sons that they were very jealous of their sister. They thought she had a far easier time of things than they did. They believed she married into money and lived a life of luxury. The boy’s father will have laid it on thick, and I think he must have pushed Graham to come so he can report back.”

  Or, I thought, to see if there was anything in it for him.

  “Also, he’s at college in Liverpool, so this way he doesn’t have to pay his own fare.” David’s attempt at lightening the conversation didn’t distract Maureen from what she had been saying.

  “But she had such a terrible time for so much of her life! Don’t they know that? What about her accident? Don’t they know her career was ruined by one moment’s stupidity?”

  “We knew Alicia had had a dreadful marriage, had been ill for most of her adult life and hadn’t been happy for years, but the boys, they always thought that because she had money she must be happy. To them it would be impossible to be unhappy if you were rich. Money was, is, their answer to everything.”

  “But after the divorce she didn’t have any.” It seemed important to Maureen that we understood her friend.

  “They never listened to anything they didn’t want to hear and they wanted to feel hard done by.”

  “So you think Graham came to delve around a bit?”

  “He probably wants to see if there’re any skeletons in the cupboard.”

  “That seems a bit harsh.”

  “I don’t like my sons a lot, there’s too m
uch of their father in them and their sons are just as bad.”

  “But Alicia was different?”

  “Yes. Alicia was different.”

  Chapter Seven

  The next morning the church was almost full.

  I wondered who all the people were and why they had come. They couldn’t possibly all have known my mother.

  I had heard that some people turned up to any funeral as a way of getting free food and drink at the wake. I recognised one or two journalists but most were people I recognised very few people.

  Most members of the congregation were in formal black, or at least generally subdued colours. Most of the women wore hats or dark scarves knotted tightly under their chins and looking from the back of the church it was a drab sight. I wondered what the Alicia I had heard about the previous night would have thought about it.

  I think she would have hated it.

  As we left Sandhey that morning Ted had handed out a variety of ties for the men and scarves and hats for the ladies so we all exhibited splashes of bright colour in the general funereal uniforms. Ted’s tie was yellow, mine red, Max’s purple and David wore a multi coloured bow tie which many of the more po-faced strangers in the congregation probably felt was better suited to the circus. Susannah, Monika, Maureen and Edie also drew whispered condemnation.

  We weren’t the only people standing out from the drab crowd.

  Two young women sitting near the back of the church appeared to have had a better idea than most of my mother’s character. The large bright green hat one was wearing should not have looked good on a redhead but I thought it looked extremely appropriate. The head of the young woman sitting next to her was crowned with an interesting creation of net and feathers almost the exact colour of her friend’s hair. I thought they looked wonderful whatever others may have thought.