by Imogen Clark
It all looks lovely and she looks at me as if I am a simpleton, the arch of her eyebrow giving a hint of the high-handed woman I met last night, but she doesn’t say anything and heads off towards the queue.
The café is filled with a mixture of tourists and people in business-wear who are presumably on their way to work. One wall is all glass and behind it the bakery is in full swing, with people in white aprons emptying ovens and pushing trolleys piled high with bread. They remind me of Oompa-Loompas even though they are neither tiny nor orange. All around the perimeter there is an overhead track that carries wire baskets filled with bread from the bakery to the shop, although when I settle on one basket and watch its slow progress around the building no one stops it at either destination to empty or refill it. Maybe they are just for the tourists.
I climb the few steps to the mezzanine and find an empty table that looks out over a service yard and then on to the bay. I can just glimpse the bridge.
Ursula approaches carrying a tray with two white cups and two pastries, which she puts down in front of me without a word.
‘Thank you,’ I say, reaching to take a cup. The pastry doesn’t look big enough to make even a dint in my hunger but it will do for now. ‘Nice place,’ I say, not quite sure how to begin.
Ursula nods. She takes one of the pastries and cuts it into tiny little cubes, which she begins popping into her mouth like sweets. I just cut mine neatly down the middle and tackle a half at a time.
‘So,’ she says after she has eaten about a third of the pastry. ‘To recap. You thought your mother, my sister, was dead. You have recently learned that this is not . . .’ She pauses as she considers her sentence and then continues. ‘Or at least might not be the case. Your father has some form of dementia and is unable to answer your questions and so you have sought me out. Is that about it? Did I leave anything out?’
There’s no emotional engagement. To her this is simply a list of facts rather than the complicated and very sad story of her own family history. However, I suppose in many ways her distanced, offhand approach might make the situation easier to deal with. This emotionless summing-up does manage to capture the essence of it all. I nod, not quite trusting my voice to work. My stomach knots tighter and tighter and my chest constricts as I sit and wait for her to tell me the truth about my entire life.
‘Well,’ says Ursula, searching out my wide-open eyes with hers and locking her gaze on to them. ‘She didn’t die. She’s still with us, God bless her.’
Her tone is scornful, derisory almost, like she has no time for her sister. But I can’t focus on that. I am working too hard to process what she just told me. My mother is definitely alive. She did not die like they all said. She left us. Of course, I have considered this possibility endlessly since I first found the postcards but it is only now that I know the truth. I find that I have only one word.
‘Why?’
Ursula picks up her coffee cup and starts to swirl the contents around. The dark liquid gets higher up the side of the cup, closer to the edge. Just as I think she is going to send it out over the table, she stops.
‘You do realise, don’t you, Cara, that when I tell you what it is that you think you want to know, then that’ll be it. There’s nothing that you can do to un-know it, no matter how hard you wish that you could. Are you sure that you’re ready for that?’
This is something that I’ve thought about a lot. Ever since I found the postcards, I’ve been tossing the problem of what to do next around in my mind like a toy boat caught in a typhoon. Sometimes I think that it would be better to forget all about it and just carry on with things as they were before, but really, in my heart of hearts, I know that’s not an option. I have to understand. There is no way back now.
I nod my head decisively. ‘Believe me,’ I say, ‘I know that. But now I’ve got this far, I really don’t know what else to do. I’ve barely let myself think about what I might do next, not until I knew for sure that she left us. And until I understand why she did that I can’t get any further with it. Please just tell me it all. Everything.’
I fight to keep the frustration out of my voice. If this is going to work then I need to stay calm. Even though this morning’s Ursula seems much less volatile than the one who stormed out of the restaurant, I mustn’t say anything that’ll make her bolt again. She eyes me up carefully as if deciding what to do and then she starts to nod slowly.
‘Okay,’ she says. ‘If you’re sure. You remind me of her, you know. She was a pretty determined kind of person too.’
So determined that she walked out on her tiny children, I want to say, but I swallow my words back into my throat. Ursula sits back in her chair and closes her eyes for a moment. Then she speaks.
‘Your mum and I grew up in a tiny two-bedroom terraced house in Tottenham. There were just the four of us. Our mother, your grandma, worked in the rag trade, sewing tatty clothes for market stalls. Dad was a locksmith. He didn’t have a shop of his own. He worked for someone who I suspect probably had some kind of gangland connections, but he was a long way down the food chain. Me and Annie, we did all right. Mum tried hard to keep us looking nice. She sewed our clothes and made sure our shoes didn’t have holes in and cooked us decent food. She was a good woman, really, despite everything. She mostly did her best by us. But Dad . . . Now he was a completely different kettle of fish.’
She gazes up at the wire bread baskets on their little track as they pass over our heads and she doesn’t say anything for a while. I can’t decide whether she is getting her memories in order or if she’s trying to find the right words. I pick at my pastry and wait.
‘Basically, my father was a bully. He bullied Mum and then, when we got big enough, he bullied us.’
‘How do you mean?’ I ask before I have time to stop myself.
Ursula looks irritated by my interruption. She’s clearly going to tell me the story at her own pace.
‘Sorry,’ I say and I don’t stop her again.
‘He was handy with his fists. Nothing unusual in that. Lots of men are. He’d go to the pub after work, especially if he’d had a good day on the horses, have a skinful and then come back and try to knock the life out of Mum. She was good at managing him, on the whole. She’d had to learn. She’d make sure there was food for him when he got back and that we were either in bed or at least quiet. If she thought he was going to be really bad, she’d take herself off. Not out of the house – she wouldn’t have left us on our own – but she’d make herself scarce upstairs or be in bed when he got back. Sometimes, though, there was no avoiding his fists. Annie and I shared a bed and we’d lie there, quiet as little mice, hoping that he’d forget we existed. We’d hear him come in and then Mum talking to him. She had this odd, bright voice that she used when she thought there might be bother. And then sometimes we’d hear him shout and then her sob. It was grim. Often it was unbearable.’
She stops talking again. Her skin looks grey, more deeply lined than before. Recounting this for me is clearly painful and I almost feel sorry for her.
‘I need more coffee,’ she says abruptly. ‘Want one?’ I can see that she needs a break, to regroup before she continues, so I nod and watch as she takes small, slow steps back downstairs to the counter.
When she returns, she sits the cups down on the table carefully and then she drops her head and runs her hands through her cropped hair. She has hands a bit like mine, slender-fingered with prominent veins snaking across their backs. She doesn’t look up but carries on speaking.
‘Anyway, that was how it was at home, with the three of us creeping about the house trying not to attract his attention, making sure there was nothing out of place that might set him off. I sometimes wished we could just leave him – me, Mum and Annie. Pack our stuff and go and live somewhere he couldn’t find us, but this was the seventies. There was nowhere for us to go. And Mum didn’t make enough at the factory to keep us even if we could find somewhere. Annie and I used to whisper in corners about what
we’d do when we left school. We were going to get jobs and share a flat, just the two of us . . .’
For a moment she looks almost wistful, but then her eyes narrow and her mouth hardens again. ‘Not that that’s how things turned out.’
Ursula spits the words out but then she takes a deep breath and pulls herself back from the anger that is just bubbling beneath the surface. ‘I don’t remember worrying about Mum much, just me and Annie. I thought that Mum’d made her bed by marrying Dad in the first place. It wasn’t our fault that she was such a bad judge of character, but we were being made to suffer the consequences. I remember the first time he really hurt me,’ she says.
As she talks, it’s almost as if I’m not even there. She speaks into the middle distance without making eye contact with anyone. I sit so still that I’m barely even breathing.
‘He threw me against the kitchen wall and broke my collarbone. Mum just watched. Annie, she was younger than me, she tried to pull him off and got a black eye for her trouble, but Mum . . . She just stood there and waited until it was all over. I never really forgave her for that.’
A steady stream of people snakes into the café but the tables around us stay empty, as if it’s somehow obvious that we need some space. Ursula continues.
‘It wasn’t just the violence. The man was basically a controlling, manipulative bastard. He was always telling us how useless we were. He bandied insults about like someone else might tell jokes. We were never good enough. We were ugly or fat or a waste of air or costing him a fortune or whatever it happened to be that day. Annie and I, we had each other. We’d tell each other that he was talking trash, that we shouldn’t take any notice, but I think Mum got really ground down by it. Every year she seemed smaller, less able to deal with him. She stopped hiding when he came in, like she was challenging him to hit her; as if, in some twisted way, she deserved it.
‘Then Anneliese met your father.’
Something in Ursula’s voice changes. Her mouth tightens, the lines around her lips becoming more prominent. She’s called Mum ‘Anneliese’. I’ve never heard this name before. I want to question it but I daren’t interrupt in case she stops talking.
‘He was quite a catch,’ she continues, her voice still low, ‘your father. He was older than Annie by eight or nine years. He seemed so sophisticated. What a joke that turned out to be, but I’m not surprised she fell for his charms. He had a good job and he used to flash his cash around. He’d take Annie out dancing and when he arrived at the house to pick her up he’d flirt with Mum. She’d smile and tell him not to be so silly but it was obvious that she really liked it. He even seemed to get on well with Dad. They’d often go for a pint together after work.’
It sounds a bit like a fairytale romance, Prince Charming arriving on a white charger to rescue my mum from peril, but I can tell by the way Ursula’s expression hasn’t changed that she doesn’t think so. I scan her face closely as she talks. The words spill out of her mouth. She barely pauses for breath. It’s like she needs to get this over and done with as quickly as possible. I sit motionless and listen hard, trying to remember every last word. I get the impression that there will be no repetition.
‘Then he proposed,’ Ursula says. ‘It felt all wrong. She was nineteen by then but I was twenty-two. It should have been me flying the nest and yet here was my baby sister with a ticket out of there. I was furious. It felt like she was abandoning me, like she was kicking me and all our plans in the teeth. Looking back, I should’ve done things differently. She was young. She didn’t know any better. I should have cut her some slack, looked after her, but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t forgive her for leaving me with him. I was vile.’
I think about how little I know about my Aunt Ursula. Her name just never came up at home. It’s only because Michael has dim memories of her that I even got to know she existed. My mind races ahead now as she talks, trying to match what she is telling me with what I already know. I have to pull myself back to the present so I don’t miss anything.
‘Anyway,’ Ursula continues. ‘She got married and had your brother and at first everything seemed rosy for her, not that I was taking much notice. Then you came along. I’d left by then but Mum told me that one day Annie just turned up on her doorstep. She had you all bundled up in her arms and a bag stuffed with as much as she could carry. She said she’d left your father, that he was treating her badly and that she wasn’t going back. Mum was furious. She wouldn’t let Annie in, made her stand on the doorstep. She wouldn’t even take the baby from her. Mum told her to turn round and go right back home. A married woman stands by her man no matter what, according to Mum. I suppose she thought that if she’d put up with our father for all those years then Annie could too.
‘And that was it. Annie had to turn round and go back to Joe. I don’t think Mum saw her again after that.’
Ursula chews on her lip and takes a couple of deep breaths. Things are starting to fall into place in my head but it still isn’t making much sense.
‘Well,’ I say slowly. ‘That explains why we never saw you or our grandparents but not why Mum left me and Michael. Did she leave after the affair?’
I don’t really know for sure that Dad had an affair but it is worth a shot. All I have is one side of some correspondence found hidden in a box, but it’s the only explanation for the break-up that makes any sense so far.
‘Ah,’ says Ursula as she stirs her coffee round and round the cup. ‘The delightful Tilly.’
Tilly? ‘T’? The ‘T’ of the love letters? My heart is beating so fast as I wait for Ursula to explain that I have to take one deep breath, right to the very bottom of my lungs, to stop me from fainting.
‘Was Tilly Mum’s friend? Is she the one with long, black hair? And a tattoo of a unicorn?’ I ask, trying to remember what Michael told me about her.
Could this be the same woman? Did Dad have an affair with Mum’s best friend?
‘That’s her. And I suppose she was your mother’s friend. In a manner of speaking,’ says Ursula with a sniff.
I can tell at once that there is no love lost between her and whoever this Tilly is.
‘And she had the affair?’ I ask.
Understanding floods through me. Poor Mum. Living with two small children in an abusive marriage and with only one friend in the world, who then has an affair with her husband. She must have felt completely alone. Her own family had already rejected her and then her best friend goes off with her husband. No wonder she left him. What else could she do?
My mind is making connections so fast that I can barely keep up. That must be why she left and then maybe Dad was so angry that he lied about her being dead to get back at her. His thing with Tilly can’t have lasted long. I would have remembered if there had been someone to replace Mum; and if I didn’t then Michael definitely would have. But that still doesn’t explain why Mum left us behind. Surely if she was running from an unfaithful husband she’d have taken her children with her? She wouldn’t have left them with him and the new woman. None of it adds up.
‘Yup,’ says Ursula, draining the end of her coffee and putting the cup down hard so that it clatters in the saucer.
‘But why would Mum leave if Dad was having an affair? Wouldn’t she just have kicked him out, made him go and live with his new woman?’
Ursula looks at me, her sharp eyes narrowed, and then she shakes her head slowly.
‘It wasn’t your father that was having an affair with Tilly. It was your mother.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
I do not know what to do. It feels like my whole world has suddenly stopped turning and yet all around me life continues. Crockery chinks, orders are shouted at the counter, the wire baskets hum along their track . . . But the sounds all deaden to nothing as I try to process what Ursula has just told me. It was my mother who was having an affair. My mother left me. Not because she was abused by my father and it was the only way that she could see to make her pain stop. No, she left me behind while sh
e indulged herself in some kind of self-centred flight of fancy. It is so clichéd that I almost laugh. My mother went off to find herself with some woman, some silk-scarf-wearing, crystal-fondling woman. Where did they run to? A remote Greek island? Goa, maybe? What a shallow, selfish person she must be. I mean, you read about women like that, who complain that having children means that they lose touch with the ‘real’ them, that their own essence gets swamped in the deluge of dirty nappies and night feeds. But to have one as your own mother . . . ? Maybe she had intended to come back and pick us up once her journey of discovery was at an end. Well, that never worked out, did it? Clearly the draw of freedom was stronger, more appealing than the pull of her maternal instinct.
I’m beginning to understand why Ursula warned me about the power of what she was about to say. Any little fantasy that I might have invented for myself as to why my mother left me, a vulnerable two-year-old girl, is about to smash to pieces on the rocks.
Suddenly I feel very sick. I have to get out of here, out into the fresh air. Away. I lurch from the table, almost falling down the steps, and push my way through the queue to the door. The air outside is tainted by exhaust fumes and the faint scent of fish but at least it’s cold. It bites into my cheeks and, as I gasp it down in big, desperate lungfuls, it cools me from the inside out. I lean against the plate-glass window of the bakery while I gather myself. The woman in the white apron has moved on from making hedgehogs to little sourdough teddies, a tray full of pasty, uncooked bears at her side.
I set off at a run, desperate now to get away from the crowds, to find some space where I can breathe. The pavements are busy, people walking calmly towards their destinations, but I jostle my way through and then find myself running along in the gutter where the route is clearer. The occasional car honks its horn at me, a mad woman running down the street without a care for her personal safety. I bear right, heading towards the bridge, drawn to the calming powers of the water, and soon the landscape breaks up into an urban park. There are grass banks and a path for runners and cyclists that snakes its way through the space. I make my way to an empty bench and drop down to it, my legs no longer having the power to carry me.
